Popular Housing and Urban Life Style in Modern France

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In order to see various problems about popular housing and urban life style in France and to understand how functions the 20th century French society, we got some precious documents (particularly, plans and photos of the garden cities built by the public housing office of the Parisian region) and began to make analyses with those documents. But, we were obliged to leave after serious inquiries into these garden cities. Thinking it indispensable to enlarge our historical view and to improve our method of the urban history, we proceeded primarily to survey on today's historical studies of the modern urban society.So, we made efforts to regard widely historical researches of various subjects, labor, social relations, state, etc. and to understand the actual situation of French urban history. At the same time, we tried to promote scientific collaborations between Japan and France, not only to compare historical facts but also to find a clue to the methodological development. One of the results is the Japanese-French symposium, held in October 2001, "New approaches to the modern urban history: everyday life, networks, representation".After these efforts, we found it very important for French urban historians to make clear the articulated urban space in relation with social groups: more concretely, to modify the image of the popular urban community, to clarify social segregations in the city, to investigate into the representation of the urban society. Another interesting point for us is that fact that historians of 19th and 20th century Japan discuss the urban society always bearing in mind the nation or the nation state, although French historians are not so inclined to find any close relations between the urban problems and the nation state. By the efforts to understand this difference, we will obtain the effective method to discover new aspects of the French urban society and to change its historical image.