Main entry:

Cupers, Kenny, author.

Title & Author:

The social project : housing postwar France / Kenny Cupers.

Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2014]

Description:

xxix, 393 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 26 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 327-369) and index.
Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Building the Banlieue -- 1950s: Projects in the Making -- 1. Streamlining Production -- 2. A Bureaucratic Epistemology -- 1960s: Architecture Meets Social Science -- 3. Animation to the Rescue -- 4. The Expertise of Participation -- 5. Programming the Villes Nouvelles -- 1970s: Consuming Contradictions -- 6. Megastructures in Denial -- 7. The Ultimate Projects -- Conclusion: Where Is the Social Project? -- Notes -- Index.
Library copy: selected for the Multidisciplinary Research Project on "Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture", 2019-2021, developed by the CCA with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

ISBN:

9780816689644 (hardback)
0816689644 (hardback)
9780816689651 (pb)
0816689652 (pb)

Subject:

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.
Architecture Politique gouvernementale France Histoire 20e siècle.
Architecture et société France Histoire 20e siècle.
ARCHITECTURE History Contemporary (1945- )
SOCIAL SCIENCE Sociology Urban.
ARCHITECTURE Urban & Land Use Planning.
Architecture and society.
Architecture and state.
City planning.
Housing.
Architektur
Stadtplanung
Stadtsoziologie
Städtebau
Urbanität
Wohnungsbau
France.
Frankreich

Form/genre:

History.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 317776
Call No.: 317776
Status: Available