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

这个项目考察了法国和比利时战后时期由国家主导的大规模住房建设。它尤其侧重于大城市的发展--这是一种从1950年代中期开始建造的高层混凝土庄园的跨国现象，目的是为日益增长的城市人口提供安全的住房。这项研究的目的是对比法国和比利时的规划文化，这些文化决定了大城市的建设，评估了国家规划方法的主要差异，以及这些不同的文化对居住在这些项目中的人的影响。通过两个案例研究来检验对比的规划文化：布鲁塞尔的Laeken CitéModèle和法国的一个类似的例子(尚未选定)。这一点的关键是对参与相关项目的主要规划师和建筑师的审查，如费尔南多·布伦弗(布鲁塞尔)和欧仁·博杜安(巴黎)。借鉴罗斯玛丽·韦克曼(2016)关于战后住房关键人物的著作，这种方法探索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为各自国家独特的规划文化做出贡献，同时也展示了城市规划的哪些要素是在更国际化的水平上制定的。这包括现代主义的国际经验，现代主义在两次世界大战之间崛起，其功能性主义在二战后继续指导房屋建设。报告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，评估了这两个国家如何应对这些挑战，以及它们的反应如何制定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。它采用了一种更具人种学的方法，调查了格兰德社区居民在建造后几十年的经历。它的目的是确定格兰德社区是否是有效的生活空间，讨论各种设施的提供、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(科莱特·佩特内特在1968年首次探索了这一点)。这一“自下而上”调查的目的是将第一部分中考察的规划文化带回现实，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国家规划文化提供了基础，对比了它们在长期提供安全的大众住房方面的有效性。除了主要比较国家规划文化之外，这项研究还提供了关于城市历史和社会住房的更广泛的辩论。值得注意的是，它阐述了当前的观点，即格兰德群体是与犯罪和剥夺有关的边缘化社区(特别是在法国)，并试图探索这些问题是否可以追溯到创造这些问题的规划文化。更广泛地说，近年来，住房供应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，以便为未来考虑可行的解决方案(例如，约翰·布顿的《市政梦想》，2018年)。这个项目通过回到战后时期的欧洲规划风格，评估他们的成功和失败，着眼于解释他们正在进行的遗产，为这一论述做出了贡献。最后，这项研究增加了有关战后比利时的文献，尽管比利时是战后欧洲重新发展和向欧洲一体化转变的中心，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.