Peripheral Decay: a comparative study of French and Belgian mass housing projects, 1953-1973

该项目考察了战后法国和比利时国家主导的大规模住房建设。它特别关注大型建筑群的发展-一种跨国现象的高层混凝土住宅区，建于20世纪50年代中期，目的是为不断增长的城市人口提供安全的住房。本研究的目的是对比法国和比利时的规划文化，这些文化决定了大剧院的建设，评估国家规划方法的关键差异，以及这些不同的文化对居住在这些项目中的人的影响。对比的规划文化通过两个案例研究来检验：布鲁塞尔的Laeken cit<e:1>模型和法国的一个类似的例子（尚未选定）。这其中的关键是对参与相关项目的主要规划师和建筑师的考察，如Fernand Brunfaut（布鲁塞尔）和eug<e:1> Beaudouin（巴黎）。借鉴Rosemary Wakeman（2016）对战后住房关键人物的研究，这种方法探讨了这些人的背景和意识形态，以及他们运作的跨国网络。这样做的目的是评估它们各自如何对各自国家独特的规划文化作出贡献，同时也表明哪些城市规划要素是在更国际化的水平上发展起来的。除了具体数字之外，本项目还考虑了对国家规划文化的更广泛影响。这包括现代主义的国际经验，现代主义在两次世界大战期间兴起，其功能主义在二战后继续指导房屋建筑。它还讨论了社会政治问题的影响，如消费主义的增长以及地区和殖民地人口向城市的迁移，评估了两个国家如何应对这些挑战，以及他们的回应如何构建了各自的大规模住房方法。该项目的第二部分涉及这些不同规划文化的结果。采用更多的民族志方法，它调查了大合奏团居民在其建设后的几十年里的经历。它的目的是确定大合奏是否是有效的生活空间，讨论设施的不同提供，与城市中心的连接（或缺乏）以及居民和国家当局之间的互动（Colette psametnet在1968年首次探讨了这一点）。这种“自下而上”的调查的目的是将第一部分所考察的规划文化带回地面，将它们的崇高目标与它们所产生的社会现实联系起来。这样做也为进一步比较各国规划文化提供了基础，比较它们在长期内提供安全的大规模住房方面的有效性。除了对国家规划文化的主要比较之外，这项研究还为围绕城市历史和社会住房的更广泛辩论提供了信息。它特别强调了目前的观点，即大乐团作为与犯罪和贫困相关的边缘化社区（特别是在法国），并试图探索这些问题是否可以追溯到创造它们的规划文化。更广泛地说，住房供应近年来已成为公共和学术话语中的一个主要话题，许多研究人员现在重新审视历史规划方法，以考虑未来可行的解决方案（例如John Boughton的市政梦想，2018）。该项目通过回归战后时期的欧洲规划风格，评估其成功与失败，并着眼于解释其持续的遗产，从而有助于这一论述。最后，该研究增加了战后比利时的文献，尽管它在战后欧洲重建和向欧洲一体化的转变中占据中心地位，但学术界对比利时的兴趣相对较少。

This project examines the state-led construction of mass housing in France and Belgium during the post-war period. In particular it focuses on the development of grands ensembles - a transnational phenomenon of high-rise concrete estates that were built from the mid-1950s with the aim of securely housing growing urban populations. The purpose of this research is to contrast the French and Belgian planning cultures that dictated the construction of the grands ensembles, assessing key disparities in national approaches to planning and the results that these different cultures had on the people who inhabited such projects.The contrasting planning cultures are examined via two case studies: the Laeken Cité Modèle in Brussels and a similar example from France (yet to be chosen). Key to this is the examination of major planners and architects who worked on the projects in question, such as Fernand Brunfaut (Brussels) and Eugène Beaudouin (Paris). Drawing on Rosemary Wakeman's (2016) work on critical figures in post-war housing, this approach explores the background and ideologies of these individuals, as well as the transnational networks in which they operated. The purpose of this is to assess how they each contributed to the unique planning cultures of their respective countries, while also demonstrating which elements of urban planning were developed at a more international level.Moving away from specific figures, this project also considers wider influences on national planning cultures. This includes the international experience of modernism, which rose to prominence during the interwar years and whose doctrine of functionality continued to direct house building after WWII. It likewise discusses the effects of socio-political issues such as the growth of consumerism and the migration of regional and colonial populations to cities, assessing how the two states tackled such challenges and how their responses framed their respective approaches to mass housing. The second part of this project concerns the results of these different planning cultures. Adopting a more ethnographic approach, it investigates the experiences of grands ensembles residents in the decades following their construction. It aims to establish whether the grands ensembles were effective living spaces, discussing the varying provision of facilities, connections (or lack of) to urban centres and interactions between residents and state authority (something first explored by Colette Pétonnet in 1968). The purpose of this 'bottom-up' investigation is to bring the planning cultures examined in the first part back down to the ground, linking their lofty aims to the social realities they engendered. In doing so it also provides a basis for a further comparison of national planning cultures, contrasting their effectiveness in providing secure mass housing over a long period of time.Beyond its main comparison of national planning cultures, this study also feeds into wider debates around urban history and social housing. It notably addresses the current perspective of grands ensembles as marginalised communities associated with crime and deprivation (particularly in France) and seeks to explore whether these problems can be traced back to the planning cultures that created them. More broadly, housing provision has in recent years become a major topic in both public and academic discourse, with many researchers now re-examining historical planning methods in order to consider viable solutions for the future (e.g. John Boughton's Municipal Dreams, 2018). This project contributes to this discourse by returning to European planning styles of the post-war period, assessing their successes and failures with an eye to explaining their ongoing legacies. Lastly, the study adds to the literature on post-war Belgium, which has received relatively little academic interest despite its centrality to post-war European redevelopment and the shift towards European integration.