THE SOCIAL PROJECT - HOUSING POSTWAR FRANCE

In the three decades following World War II, the French government
engaged in one of the twentieth century’s greatest social and
architectural experiments: transforming a mostly rural country into a
modernized urban nation. Through the state-sanctioned construction of
mass housing and development of towns on the outskirts of existing
cities, a new world materialized where sixty years ago little more than
cabbage and cottages existed.

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.