“Il mondo e paese” (the world’s a village) say the Italians, and news from France makes the point. Why? Because the French seem to be making the same mid-course corrections to their urban renewal policies that the Americans made several decades ago. In the 1990s, U.S. housing policy started demolishing high-rise, low- and moderate-income housing complexes (i.e., “families in the air”) and replacing them with less dense, low-rise mixed income housing. Well, the French are doing the same, to the tune of $60 billion.
The New York Times recently reported France’s efforts to demolish La Courneuve’s Balzac housing tower, a 16 story, 600-foot edifice that sits in a neighborhood where drugs and violence are the norm. But this isn’t the first time the French government looked to architecture to solve social problems.
According to the old conventional wisdom, “residential areas ought to remain separate from roads and the workplace, and so the [Balzac] cluster was built as a sort of island; residents trudged across a muddy field to reach the adjacent train station.” The new conventional wisdom deplores the homogeneity and monotony and social segregation of the old.
But the new wisdom still rests on the same premise as the old, namely that architecture can shape social outcomes. “’Mixing’ and ‘openness’ have replaced ‘separation’ and ‘uniformity’ as the watchwords of the day. But the central lesson of past decades, Ms. [Marie-Christine Vatov, architecture and urban planning editor for Innovapresse] said, has been the error of such faith in the power or architecture.”
