I really appreciated the analysis by François Dubet and Fabien Truong on the anger of the suburbs, published in Le Monde dated October 7. Their images of the airlock becoming a trap and the renovation of facades supposed to deal with social problems are screamingly true. However, it would be good to go beyond the internal causes of these territories and to question the context of global society.
I will not position myself as a researcher in social sciences, but as an observer of my territory. “Deported” by the great wave of rural exodus, I married him following my doctoral thesis in geography on Grand Corbeil (Essonne). Having become an urban planner for the public establishment for the new town of Évry, I still live in one of these neighborhoods which wanted to return to the streets, with mainly collective housing.
A first phase attracted a strong majority of middle classes, but in the 1980s and 1990s, they fled to the ghettos of the rich of the neighboring plateaus, giving way to the new working classes from all over the seas. And our former Republic schools have become powerful engines of segregation.
What worries me most is to see my homeland sinking into disenchantment with the city. Since Presidents Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand sparked a dream of America for all, based on automobile comfort and a cottage with a garden, near the cows, there are only poor people under house arrest – or manic activists like me – for still wanting to fuel the life of an urban community, now an outdated model.
The city is dead, they say. Since we are all urbanites, we can go to the countryside, to confirm a great individual rise. In this context, I find the term “city politics” significant – but scandalous. He asserts the realization of their failure to those who remain caught in the trap.
But the behavior of the “winners” is far from being the main cause. We find it rather in the administrative structures of France, the only country in Europe to still have more than 10,000 municipalities. In order to maintain control over urban planning, our neighbors are constantly expanding their municipal boundaries. Corseted in a Jacobinism well before 1789, our nation remains flattering local service managers. They will always be indispensable, but for the moment, they are heavily crushed by the problems of the entire built-up area, borne by no one.
The big city brings a complexity of scale, which far exceeds brave volunteer [elected officials], who arrive naive following the local elections. Their budgets are far from allowing them to rely on services sufficient in number and skills. Often, worried about being overwhelmed by those more enlightened than themselves, they fear their technicians.
On the other hand, they are overwhelmed by requests from businessmen who they do not clearly see where they are leading them. This explains our anarchy of large peripheral shopping areas, unique in Europe. Responsible – without their knowledge – for the tragedy of our suburbs, they themselves are first and foremost victims, who urgently need to get out of such a mess.
The nine new towns of the Gaullist era were an attempt to overcome this impotence. Five in number around Paris and four around provincial metropolises, their goal was to structure amorphous agglomerations into multipolar urban regions. To bring about the emergence of local companies in control of their destinies, bringing together housing, employment and the equipment necessary for complex urban life.
The State provided the force of proposal, but elected officials always decided, thanks to new forms of intercommunal cooperation. Thus the State established a team of a hundred or more people on each site, including many architects and engineers, but also landscapers, geographers, sociologists, economists, etc. The role of representatives of the human and social sciences was to define the equipment to be built and to find investors, public and private. Hence the name programmers that we were given. Next door, economists were prospecting companies to populate our business areas.
In Évry, we have created more than 50,000 jobs, more than housing built. The programmers also had the role of prefiguring social and cultural life, by founding animation, reception, training associations, etc. on the scale of fifteen to thirty municipalities. Because town planning is not just a matter for architects and engineers. The goal is above all to create society.
But this ambition fizzled out. With the intercommunality reform of 1983, elected officials replaced state representatives as presidents of the new urban areas. And they worked to refocus local life on the old bell towers. We no longer needed the dozens of leaders created by the Public Development Establishment. And the new presidents decided to let each mayor be the arbiter of what would happen in his municipality.
The first towns built (especially Cergy and Évry) were designed in the 1960s, a time when former members of the Resistance still occupied many key positions in the ministries. They were still demanding on social diversity, popular education, and the rapprochement between housing and employment. However, from the end of the 1970s, the dream of a “town in the country” changed the perspective. The city could spread out over the countryside, but thirty kilometers from Paris, a house is still expensive. The bottom of the middle class, if they want to achieve this dream, must look a hundred kilometers or more away from their work.
Here comes the imperative to save the planet. With this in mind, Bruno Latour highlighted an objective of “territories-basins of life”, quite close to the cities that we were planning. The merit would be an adaptation of the transition measures to the singularity of the sector. But today residents are captive to municipal boundaries. Like elected officials, they are stunned if you talk to them about the uniqueness of their sector. Here, they are in an inner-city commune like any other, a ghetto of the rich or a ghetto of the poor. The history of their territory, its professions, its specialties, the advantages of its geography, are not perceived.
Two notes of hope however. By putting a little Gironde in its administration, France would only align itself with the example of its European neighbors, much more faithful to their rites of collective inclusion. Many examples of carnivals, flea markets, festivals of all kinds served as benchmarks for us. […] And, second note, the ZAN principle (zero net artificialization) already requires real estate developers to find land elsewhere than in the countryside. Here and there, residents are once again interested in the history and geography of the area, to land there and build connections.
André Darmagnac, Evry-Courcouronnes (Essonne)
