![]() | The Social Project: Housing Postwar France Subjects: City planning -- France -- History -- 20th century; Housing -- France -- History -- 20th century; Architecture and state -- France -- History -- 20th century; Architecture and society -- France -- History -- 20th century; Winner of the 2015 Abbott Lowell Cummings prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum
Known as the banlieue , the suburban landscapes that make up much of contemporary France are near-opposites of the historic cities they surround. Although these postwar environments of towers, slabs, and megastructures are often seen as a single utopian blueprint gone awry, Kenny Cupers demonstrates that their construction was instead driven by the intense aspirations and anxieties of a broad range of people. Narrating the complex interactions between architects, planners, policy makers, inhabitants, and social scientists, he shows how postwar dwelling was caught between the purview of the welfare state and the rise of mass consumerism. The Social Project unearths three decades of architectural and social experiments centered on the dwelling environment as it became an object of modernization, an everyday site of citizen participation, and a domain of social scientific expertise. Beyond state intervention, it was this new regime of knowledge production that made postwar modernism mainstream. The first comprehensive history of these wide-ranging urban projects, this book reveals how housing in postwar France shaped both contemporary urbanity and modern architecture. Kenny Cupers is assistant professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is coauthor of Spaces of Uncertainty and editor of Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture. |
![hidden image for function call](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/1x1.png)