Part I
France
The state was king â popular French saying
France has a prominent place in the Europe that is unfolding. The French Revolution overthrew the old order of rigid privilege and exploitation, and generated a shift towards egalitarianism that created strong international waves. The rise and fall of the Emperor Napoleon built on the French sense of a grandiose international role and a preoccupation with state power and state-driven development. The rebuilding of Paris in the latter half of the nineteenth century gave France a uniquely planned and beautifully laid-out capital. France offered a model of civic development to the world.
The long-standing tensions with other European powers â Britain as well as the emergent Germany â made the French both proud, involved and aloof. The traditional neglect of housing for the growing urban populace in favour of civic and industrial works of great significance created a legacy in France which set her apart from the rest of Northern Europe.
France in the 1960s and 1970s built more high-rise, peripheral, mass housing estates than any other country in Western Europe. There have been more extensive violent disorders in French cities than elsewhere on the Continent. Racial tensions have often been intense. French housing experts are more outspoken about the problems of social segregation and polarisation that have resulted than any other national body.
The French have gone out of their way to foster partnership between central, local and regional government, stressing the vital role of the elected mayors of the local communes in which the difficult social housing estates are located. In spite of the still immense power of the state, they help create local civic pride and strongly defended local initiatives.
French housing policy since the war has advanced in three main directions: limited state support for private renting, as a result of which one-third of French households still rent from private landlords, although many of these are in furnished rooms and some in hotels; generous support to owner-occupation, offering grants as well as low-cost loans to households of modest means, leading to a dramatic increase in the construction of pavilions â single-family, detached surburban and semi-rural houses â and resulting in over half the population now owning their own homes; continuing ambitious social housing programmes which are still running at 50,000 units a year or more to help meet growing demand from more needy groups and indirectly to help the economy, as well as to create higher-quality, smaller-scale urban housing.
The major housing preoccupation of the 1980s was the grands ensembles, the social housing estates usually built as dense, high-rise blocks on the edge of cities. These troubled housing areas caught the headlines in 1981 as disorders broke out in a number of them, often between young people of North African origin and the police, generating support for renovation programmes. Renewed outbreaks of urban disorders in 1990 and 1991 led to a further expansion of government initiatives. The French experience of urban segregation and regeneration offers a wide canvas of very mixed experiences.
France today faces similar problems to other countries in this study of European housing: a high level of unemployment, particularly among young people of immigrant origin; strong social dislocation, stemming in part from very rapid urban expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, and continuing thereafter; increasing problems of cost, of loan default, and of urban sprawl in the owner-occupied sector; decline of the private-rented sector through inner-city renewal and renovation; intense polarisation in the society as a whole between the affluent majority and the large minorities of immigrant origin, of one-parent families, and of socially and economically marginal households; growing demand for social housing from lower-income groups; severe decline in large, peripheral estates where social and economic problems are most starkly and intensely exhibited.
Post-war France was the most serious protagonist in the evolution of the European Community, insisting on ever-closer relations with her most powerful ally and erstwhile enemy, Germany; engaging in active partnership with other members and potential members of the Community; and constantly pushing the pace on ventures like the Channel Tunnel and highspeed rail links across Europe. These international links belie her reputation for defending a strongly independent national identity and hark back to her historic role in forging the future of Europe. Her current pioneering approach to the wider social and economic problems surrounding mass housing is a microcosmic reflection of this ambitious role. The aim is to explain Franceâs rapid post-war urbanisation and provide the history behind some of todayâs tensions.
Chapter 1
Background
BACKGROUND FACTS ABOUT FRANCE
While France is similar in size of population to Britain, with 56.4 million people, it has less than half the density, with only 102 people per square kilometre (Economist Pocket Europe, 1992). It has more young people and fewer old people than any other country in the study except Ireland, and a higher birth-rate than Germany or Denmark, though its birth-rate has fallen significantly. It has higher unemployment than Germany or Denmark, and about the same as Britain. France sits in the middle of the income range with higher income per head than Britain or Ireland (World Bank Development Report 1991).
France has experienced major waves of population immigration. French population statistics do not show French residents originating from French ex-colonies that became overseas provinces of the French Republic as they are considered indistinguishable from mainland French inhabitants and enjoy full French citizenship. Thus, many ethnic minorities from the French Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands are not counted and their numbers can only be guessed at. There are also growing numbers of second generation naturalised French citizens of ethnic minority origin. Therefore, official French immigration figures only reflect a part of the picture. None the less, 7 per cent of the French population is officially classed as of immigrant origin, with the largest group originating from North Africa. There are estimated to be a further 6 million French residents of recent foreign origin (Superior Council for Integration 1991). The French housing stock is shown in Table 1.2.
Table 1.1 Basic demographic facts about France, 1985 Size of population | 56,400,000 |
Density of population (inhabitants per km2) | 102 |
Proportion of under-15-year-olds | 20% |
Crude birth-rate per 1,000 population | 13.8 |
Unemployment | 10.1% |
People over 65 | 14% |
Household size | 2.5 |
Immigrants | 7% |
Population in urban areas | 74% |
Table 1.2 Distribution of French housing stock by tenure, 1991 | Millions | % |
Total occupied units | 20.83a | 100 |
Owner-occupiers | 11.23 | 53 |
Private-renting (including furnished and tied accommodation) | 6.00b | 30 |
Social renting | 3.54c | 17 |
Total stock (including vacant and secondary residences) | 25.00 | |
In the thirty-five years from 1955 to 1990 France moved from having some of the worst housing conditions, the grossest overcrowding, and an extremely low rate of building to having a massive level of production over the 1980s, totalling about 300,000 units a year. How this remarkable shift came about, and the unique forms that it took, constitutes the core of Franceâs housing history.
EARLY HISTORY
For many centuries France dominated Europe politically. French history was marked by Republican fervour, and international and sometimes imperial ambitions. The French Revolution of 1789 shook Europe and made France a pathfinder in a new, if sometimes cruel, ...