The Social Project: Housing Postwar France

Author:   Kenny Cupers ,  Kenny Cupers (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Publisher:   University of Minnesota Press
ISBN:  

9780816689644


Pages:   424
Publication Date:   01 April 2014
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
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The Social Project: Housing Postwar France


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Overview

Winner of the 2015 Abbott Lowell Cummings prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum Winner of the 2015 Sprio Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians Winner of the 2016 International Planning History Society Book Prize for European Planning History Honorable Mention: 2016 Wylie Prize in French Studies 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Kenny Cupers ,  Kenny Cupers (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Publisher:   University of Minnesota Press
Imprint:   University of Minnesota Press
Dimensions:   Width: 20.30cm , Height: 5.10cm , Length: 25.40cm
Weight:   1.420kg
ISBN:  

9780816689644


ISBN 10:   0816689644
Pages:   424
Publication Date:   01 April 2014
Audience:   General/trade ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

Table of Contents

Contents AbbreviationsAcknowledgments Introduction: Building the Banlieue 1950s: Projects in the Making1. Streamlining Production2. A Bureaucratic Epistemology 1960s: Architecture Meets Social Science3. Animation to the Rescue4. The Expertise of Participation5. Programming the Villes Nouvelles 1970s: Consuming Contradictions6. Megastructures in Denial7. The Ultimate Projects Conclusion: Where Is the Social Project? NotesIndex

Reviews

"""A thorough history of the development of post-World War II mass housing in France.""—The Culture Machine"


A thorough history of the development of post-World War II mass housing in France. -The Culture Machine


A thorough history of the development of post-World War II mass housing in France. --The Culture Machine


Author Information

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.

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