a history of urban research: the french experience since 1965

A history of urban research: the French experience since 1965" by Christian Topalov

It is no easy matter to produce a history of ideas. It is even less easy to write the history of one's own generation and yet for some years now urban research, whether inspired by marxism, radicalism or merely the spirit of criticism, and which has had such an influence on the 1970s has now in turn become an object of study (Ganne, 1980; Zukin, 1980; Lebas, 1982; Albertsen, 1985; Amiot, 1986). But the fact that it is time to draw up the balance sheet means that an era is coming to a close. Clearly the golden period of urban research has ended in France and perhaps, generally speaking, in all comparable industrial countries. In this field as in others, an out of date way of thinking and acting has begun to crumble without having as yet given rise to any new order - at least one visible to us now. So it is probably fair to talk about a crisis which, in my view, can be said to manifest itself on three levels. The object of urban research is fading away, its institutions are being worn down and its ideas are running dry.

Thus, the aims of research as they have been defined up until now appear already to belong to the past. The growth of urban areas and old industrial regions which, it was believed, would continue indefinitely has been replaced by recession. The planning system which developed since the start of the century, along with the welfare state, has collapsed. Social movements which have been customarily described as 'urban' have become weaker. Thus the objects of research, which only 10 years ago were clear for all to see, have disintegrated before our very eyes.

Moreover, since the middle of the 1970s, funding for planning and urban research has dried up and the specialist institutions have become weaker or have in some cases disappeared. The ideology of laissez-faire and deregulation has become the official doctrine of many governments. At the same time the professional classes which were previously in vigorous expansion have ceased to regenerate themselves and are now questioning their social identity.

*The origin of this article was a conference to the Scientific Mission of the French Embassy in Washington and a paper to the conference entitled 'Urban investigation in Latin America' (City Investigations Centre, Quito). I would like to thank Laurence Ratier-Coutrot and Fernando Carri6n for having given me the opportunity of providing researchers from another continent with this very personal vision of a recent aspect of French intellectual history.

626 A history of urban research: the French experience since 1965

Finally, the theoretical models worked out during the previous period have been profoundly shaken. Intellectual systems which have for long been productive now appear to have lost their hold on reality. Times have changed. For reasons both good and bad, we can see that all systems for the global interpretation of society are now in question. Thus, it has again been decided that all ideas based on Marx are out of date (Castells, 1983). But it is not just a question of marxism - all forms of critical thought are also under attack. By critical thought I mean intellectual approaches which search for hidden structure behind the practical evidence of common sense and which, by questioning the conditions of possible knowledge and action, place in doubt the ‘natural’ order of society. With the return in force of positivism, we are now told that it is better to describe small things than attempt to explain large things.

Such a crisis is not easy to face, least of all for those who were the protagonists in the period which has now drawn to a close. In order to understand what has happened, and what is happening, all we can do is to look at history, use the critical approach to the full and apply it to ourselves. We must seek insights into the social context of our research work. This approach may lead to disagreeable conclusions in respect to ourselves, the subjects of the inquiry. We have been the products of an historical period which has led to this condition and which made us what we were.

I Birth of a ‘French school of urban sociology’, 1968-1975

1 A call to arms: the situation in the 1960s

France in the 1960s was marked by the growth of the technocratic administration of urban development. For the first time in this century central government was taking direct control of urban planning, which up until then had been controlled by local authorities. This development was one of the effects of the political system set up from 1958 onwards which weakened elective institutions at all levels in the state apparatus. It was, however, inevitable that such a situation should lead to an acceleration in the application of an old reforming ideal, that of social modernization to be achieved by means of rational planning free from the heavy hand of politics. This was the basic plan adopted by urbanists at the start of the century in France, as elsewhere. It was also the aim of gaullist technocrats during the 1960s. In the name of the plan and a science for the improvement of space, they battled against local politicians, the traditional pillars of the establishment made up of the local middle classes and municipal leaders from the workers’ movement. Basically, during this period France was trying out a process of administrative centralization of urban policies similar to that which the UK had known in the 1920s and the USA in the 1930s. This new political and administrative framework was set up in a period when capitalist growth appeared to have achieved final stability. Industry was expanding and decentralizing, the

Christian Topalov 627

building industry was experiencing a boom which was unprecedented for over a century. The dominant forces of financial capital invested in the building industry and public policy worked alongside and actively supported this development.

This was the situation in which the state looked to the social sciences for assistance. In the administrative organization of the planning authority some of the top civil servants discovered that they were totally unaware of the conditions and social consequences of their actions. Yet their modernization programme was global, it could not just satisfy a purely technical vision of change. Therefore, research programmes were initiated which required the co-operation of the university sector. The initial attempts dated from the start of the 1960s but large scale funding did not occur until 1967-68.

However, academia resisted the siren calls of the technocrats. This was the inevitable result of a long tradition. The universities had grown up in France in isolation from society and had a deep distrust not only of the business world but also of government departments. Ever since the consolidation of the republic at the end of the nineteenth century, the universities had considered themselves to be the guardians of both science and humanism, invested with the dual mission of educating the citizen and protecting him from the powers that be. It was from this ideology that came some of the opposition between ‘pure research’ and ‘applied research’, the latter being left to minor institutions and the private sector. Moreover, this university sector marked by the tradition of republican humanism was to constitute for some time one of the forces of passive resistance to the gaullist state. Amongst these forces could also be counted the local notables who controlled the local authorities and the senate. In addition, the university sector prior to 1968 was organized in a quasi-feudal way: the monopoly of power enjoyed by the senior professors was based on a client system, necessitating respect for the boundaries between the traditional disciplines and the rejection of any principle of legitimacy outside the academic hierarchy.

However, a few innovators accepted collaboration with the planning authorities and they became the pioneers of urban research. As a general rule, they enthusiastically espoused the technocratic method of problem solving. Their aim was to clarify political and administrative decisions, believing, no doubt, that the more the decision makers knew, the better would be their decisions. A conference organized by the CNRS in 1971 on the ‘Interdisciplinary analysis of urban growth’ expresses this frame of mind most admirably (Ledrut, 1972).

Thus French social sciences rediscovered the role of the expert - that modern counsellor of princes who provides scientific answers to the problems of planners. So now part of the French academic world was trying to follow an approach which had been adopted by their North American counterparts over 50 years earlier. We should, however, note a major difference between France and the USA in respect of the relations between university and society. In France these consist exclusively of discussions between a handful of top civil servants and a minority of the traditional academic hierarchy. In the USA, in contrast, the specialist sociologies which appeared in the 1920s were a result of many different links


between extremely flexible university institutions and various groups in lay society, primarily the managerial classes but also the social work sector and that of the professions. In the area of urban sociology, in particular, the Chicago school was born and developed in close connection with the local reforming classes, the influence of which was not affected by political upheavals. One of the reasons for the fragile nature of specialist sociologies in France is probably linked to the fact that the various areas of research remain weakly institutionalized and professionalized - their very existence depending on fluctuating administrative demand. In the area which is of interest to us here, this is particularly connected to the fact that the occupation of urban planner has no historical foundation. It is not based on any ancient or deep-rooted system of university teaching or, despite the existence of the French Society of Urban Planners, on any important independent professional body. The key posts remain controlled by the civil service corps of highway engineers.'

It is therefore no surprise that for the university research workers who answered the call of the planners in the middle of the 1960s, the theoretical inspiration came mainly from the USA. Their work involved a small number of areas of research, each of which had been established to answer a question posed by a government requirement. It is worthwhile providing a short list since we are seeing today the reappearance of some of these questions under forms which scarcely differ.

The first question was for the economists. It was not possible to control the pace and direction of the accelerated process of urbanization. In order to plan this it was necessary to predict it and for this it had to be modelled. Expensive research programmes were therefore begun to produce econometric models of urban growth. Concepts, methods and computer programmes were imported direct from the USA for this purpose. Models of the real estate market were derived directly from the theories of Alonso (Mayer, 1965), as well as models of the property market based on the 'filtering up' theory and global models of urban development (Merlin, 1968). For a number of years, East Lansing, Michigan, held no secrets for French technocrats. The task, however, appeared to be beyond the capabilities of academic economists. It was achieved, in the main, by large private or semi-public design offices linked to property groups. The results obtained were slender in spite of interesting empirical research on the town as a built environment and, in particular, on the urban land and property markets (Granelle, 1970). The failure of the enterprise soon appeared when the construction of models was reduced to the manufacture of urban games designed for teaching purposes (Preteceille, 1974).

The second question for planners related to the citizens themselves. How would households react to the urban environment and how could this be organized to assist their adaptation? The reply was provided by cultural social psychology

'= Ponts et chausskes


which appeared in the early 1950s (Ledrut, 1968). One of its basic assumptions was that there was no direct causal relationship between the physical characteristics of the urban environment and the behaviour of individuals. However, interaction was discovered between the environment and cultural models which led either to positive adaptation or tensions. The planner should try to design projects in such a way as to minimize the latter. This line of research, particularly well represented by Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, no doubt takes account of North American cultural life but is essentially based on an indigenous tradition: that of investigations into families and local districts which have been carried out for many decades by social workers, especially those from a catholic background. The results of this line of research were varied. They involved major investigations into the urban behaviour of households (Chombart de Lauwe et al., 1952; 1960; Cornau et al., 1965) and also qualitative research in the ‘community studies’ tradition, either in old districts affected by urban renewal (Coing, 1966) or on new housing estates (Clerc, 1967; Lamy, 1971). They also involved investigations carried out by interviews which attempted to reveal the cultural patterns of the population, in particular in respect of housing and property (Haumont, 1966; Haumont et al., 1971).

The third question posed by the requirements of the state needed rather more consideration. It was what are the obstacles preventing improvement of the planning system and, in particular, how can we remove the obstacles that local authorities place in the way of technocratic rationality? This leads to a consideration of sociological factors. Contrary to the humanist and reforming tradition represented by Chombart, this approach had absolutely no connection with the actual content of planning decisions and their possible effects on populations. Its purpose was only to analyse the social system producing public decisions. The strategic analysis was of the protagonists, who are both internal and external to the institutional system and who use a complex set of resources to influence political and administrative decisions. In this work we recognize the assumptions of the US sociology of organizations and research carried out on local political systems from Robert Dahl to Terry Clark, approaches introduced into France by Michel Crozier. This research involved the administration of urban planning (Thoenig and Friedberg, 1970; Thoenig, 1973) and local political systems (Worms, 1966; Birnbaum, 1973; Grkmion, 1976). It showed that decision processes are very different from those suggested by administrative organization charts. In other words, the normal picture of urban policy as being conceived at the top of the government system and applied locally through an hierarchical administrative system does not correspond to reality. For example, the pre‘ftr is as much the representative of local leading citizens to central government as the government’s representative in the dkpartements. Such analysis, which as a matter of principle ignored all the social aspects of the political game other than empire building was, as might be imagined, a source of delight to scheming top civil servants.

At the same time, other types of research existed alongside the government


research requirement. Although these were relegated to the sidelines by official urban research and later by marxist research, they did establish new ideas which took off in the 1980s. Some of these studies concerned urbanism. Largely inspired by the urban semiology of Lynch they looked at the town as a system of signs and symbols. Underlying these studies we find the belief that urbanism has a mission to construct an urban dimension which can be understood by citizens and in so doing create a symbolic order. This point of view led to a criticism of functionalist urbanism, which was at the time dominant. It found no favour amongst the technocrats of the 1960s (Lefevre, 1967). It gave rise to the first postwar French studies on urban forms and the history of urbanism (Choay, 1965; Kopp, 1967). It heralded historical research on urban architecture which began to develop at the end of the 1970s (Castex, Depaule and Panerai, 1977). In addition, a marxist version of the same critical humanism was expressed by Henri Lefevre. The philosopher of alienation and reification, he extended his analyses of daily life in a capitalist society by considering the town itself (Lefhvre, 1968; 1970). Although his ideas had a profound influence on part of the 1968 student movement, it was later to be brushed aside by the supporters of ‘antihumanism’, as being purely speculative. He was thus unfortunately ignored by marxist urban research in the 1970s.

Finally, the great tradition of French human geography produced highly detailed descriptions of contemporary urbanism (BastiC, 1964; Association Universitaire, 1967), and historians began to interest themselves in the city. Amongst these, some studied the origins of social housing policies (Guerrand, 1966; Raymond, 1966) and others undertook major theses on urban history (Gaillard, 1977; Jacquemet, 1984) which prepared the way for the later considerable influence that their discipline was to have in this field of research.

2 The I968 watershed

From 1968, a series of changes took place which led to a major modification of the institutional and intellectual landscape of urban research. Government urban policy had reached a major turning point. The large financial institutions were now established in the property market and were collaborating closely with those holding political power in order to direct vast urbanization operations. The important decisions fell less and less to the technical administrative authorities and the ideology of planning became weaker at the very time when it was being provided with the legislative and institutional frameworks that it had been requesting for over 50 years. Paradoxically, this situation gave technocracy a wider margin of freedom to conceive its programmes of research. Moreover, the 1968 social upheaval posed a major problem for the state: what could be done to ensure that such a thing could never happen again? Gaullist political speeches went through a distinctly reforming phase at this time.

It was under these circumstances, not by any means unique to France, that funding for urban research was increased by a considerable extent. The new


research teams had a large degree of freedom. They felt that the social science academic establishment, considerably weakened by the university crisis, was now bankrupt. Not only had it resisted, for the most part, all overtures from the administration but it had shown its inability to innovate sufficiently to meet the major challenges of urbanization and social crisis. The administration set up a new research milieu by funding a large number of small organizations on the margin or outside the universities or the CNRS. A new generation of researchers would be born out of this policy which provided funding equally to outsiders and to senior university professors (which the latter found outrageous). Outside the constraints of the academic system, and often ignorant of its traditions, these young researchers were, however, closely dependent on the bodies which fund them. This new generation, which for 10 years provided urban research with its personnel, was the product of a very particular set of political and intellectual circumstances. These graduates of ’68 were, as the famous quotation goes ‘the children of Marx and Coca Cola’.

The international climate at the end of the 1960s was in fact marked by vigorous capitalist growth, the East-West dktenre and the rise of revolutionary forces in the world’s trouble spots. In Europe, the workers’ movement and the political organizations of the left rediscovered a vigour that they had lost in the years following the liberation. The long postwar expansion gave rise to new social tensions. In France, the Communist Party committed itself to a strategy of democratic change founded on an alliance with the Socialists. The Socialist Party was rejuvenated, it renounced the politics of the ‘third force’ and the parliamentary left soon offered the prospect of a joint programme of government (1972-77). In addition, the organizations of the extreme left were active, expressing the radicalism of a part of youth. Union action was frequently united and was based on a powerful popular movement, culminating in the strikes of MaylJune 1968.

This international groundswell found a wide range of political expression with the successes of liberal, labour and social democratic policies and in southern Europe with the rise of what was then known as ‘euro-communism’. Such a situation deeply influenced the intellectual world and favoured the development of many types of critical thought calling into question the established orders. In France this was mainly expressed by a rejuvenation of marxism or, rather. of various forms of marxism. Here we had something very different from the doctrines which had crystallized during the Stalinist period and the cold war (Anderson, 1976). It was a rebirth of western marxism, both more theoretical and more empirical, what might be called a ‘workshop’ theory, the main aim of which was to analyse things as they were rather than decree what they should be. This phenomenon was international and gave rise to a wide variety of developments, in philosophy and epistemology, in history, anthropology and political economy, whilst intellectual exchanges were intense between the marxist groups in the central industrialized countries and those on the periphery. As regards the fierce controversies between the different schools of thought each


claiming to be marxist, these could be seen as an indication of its vigour. I do think, however, that the rise of these forms of marxism, which was the

most prominent feature of this period, was part of a wider intellectual conjuncture. This involved an extremely varied development of critical thought and the temporary retreat of positivism. The French form of this phenomenon was, principally, structuralism, a theoretical approach which radically refused to accept the evidence of common sense, in particular in its main aspect, the sovereignty of the subject. Those who claimed to be marxists, and many of those who were not influenced by it or who rejected it, nevertheless found themselves on fairly common epistemological ground.

3 New subjects

A new form of urban research was to develop on these bases. For a period, France was the most dynamic centre of this research. It was no longer a question of providing new answers to old questions but of defining new subjects of research and of finally providing urban sociology with a foundation (Castells, 1968). The problems traditionally expressed by the requirements of the state were thus rejected and reformulated. The urban environment ceased to be accepted as a fact to which individual citizens had to adapt, but rather as a social product resulting both from the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and collective action. The ‘spontaneous urbanization trends’ which the planners were supposed to control were no longer regarded as the effects of market forces but as the manifestation of the capitalist order and its contradictions. It was no longer a question of measuring the effectiveness of the instruments of urban policy as a function of the official aims of technocracy, but of including the state itself and its policies in the field of analysis. It was a question of uncovering the objective structural links which bound the agents of urbanization, independently of the reasons that they gave for their actions.

In other words, the town was no longer defined as a fact of nature, a set of market mechanisms, a subject of planning or a culture: it was the product of the social structure in its entirety and at the same time the result of the struggle of class contradictions. Within this structure no one element could therefore be taken for granted. Whether we were dealing with the urban environment, public policy or social practice, there was no longer any independent variable, everything had to be analysed simultaneously as part of the same process, capitalist urbanization. It was not possible to study the customs of the town without also studying its production. It was not possible to consider private economic agents and public action separately. It was not possible to isolate the technical aspect from the politics nor the politics from the social movements. This approach implied that abolition of boundaries between academic disciplines and the new urban research thus mobilized sociologists and economists, legal experts and architects.

Like any intellectual movement led by agents external to the established system


of cultural legitimacy, marxist urban research in the 1970s began by sweeping away the past and academic tradition. Persuaded that it was subverting the questions that the state put to it, it believed, moreover, that it could free itself from the effects of the administrative requirements on its own development. This renouncing of its origins and misreading of the historical conditions of intellectual production were to give French urban research in the 1970s an undeniable creativity but would have serious consequences. Nevertheless, after this theoretical decision to place the town back in the global dynamics of capitalist accumulation and its contradictions, new subjects of empirical research could appear. If the town is a social product we must start by examining its process of production and in order to achieve this we must go beyond its neoclassical description as a set of markets independent of the planning process. We must examine both the accumulation of capital in urban production and the role of public policies in this process. Hence the work carried out into the production of the elements of the urban environment and its agents (Asher and Lacoste, 1974), in particular the investigations into property developers (Topalov, 1974), the work of banks in the housing sector (Combes and Latapie, 1974) and building firms (Combes, 1978). Research was carried out into the history of forms of production and ownership of property (Lescure, 1982; Topalov, 1987). A debate developed on the theory of urban ground rents (Lipietz, 1974; Lafont and Leborgue, 1977; Topalov, 1984) and the mechanisms involved in the formation of property prices were re-examined (Carassus, 1983). The role of planning in the spatial organization of the production of the urban environment was studied, in particular in the case of large housing blocks (PrCteceille, 1973) and urban renewal (Godard et al., 1973; Duclos, 1973).

In these studies into the production of the town we can, however, see a gap which in general characterizes urban research of this period: work on the role of industry and services in urbanization is rare (Scott, 1986). In spite of some research on the planning of industrial development infrastructures, and especially on the operation of labour markets (Coing, 1982), relations between changes in the division of labour and forms of urbanization were rarely studied (Freyssenet, 1977).

The town was thus defined mainly as the space where collective consumption and the reproduction of the labour force takes place (Castells, 1972). In spite of the objections of those who took the theoretical view that the town was a system of production (Lojkine, 1977; PrCteceille, 1981; PrCteceille and Terrail, 1985), empirical work focused on the urban infrastructure and services which provided the means of social consumption. A series of research projects looked at public policy in the area of collective equipment (Dagnaud, 1978) and, in particular, the relationship between housing policies and reproduction of the labour force (Magri, 1977). In these areas the need for historical studies was rapidly recognized, for example into the origins of the Paris mktro and urban planning (Cottereau, 1969; 1970), or relating to legislation in the area of social housing (Magri, 1972; Pingon, 1976). Other work analysed the spatial arrangements


resulting from urban infrastructure policies and the segregation processes linked to them (Ion, 1972; PinGon-Charlot, PrCteceille, and Rendu, 1986). Whilst this research centred on public policies, other work involved investigations into popular movements, which developed throughout the 1970s, concerned with urban problems (Castells, 1973), in particular around the problems of housing (Castells er al., 1978) and public transport (Cherki and Mehl, 1979). The topic of ‘urban social movements’, resulting from work on urban developments in North and South America, became one of the main directions of French urban sociology. Nevertheless, although we were still dealing with an approach which was not very widespread, it was in the area of collective consumption that the limitations of studying just public policy and collective action, and the need to take into account the daily habits of the inhabitants themselves, (Chamboredon and Lemaire, 1970; Godard, 1975).

The study of local urban policy attempted to bring together these various sectoral approaches and to reintroduce both the complexity of class relations and the specific interplay of politics. Numerous monographs were produced on major conurbations such as Paris (Lojkine, 1972; Dagnaud, 1983), Lyon (Lojkine, 1974), Marseilles (Bleitrach, 1981) and Lille (Lojkine, Delacroix and Malieu, 1978) as well as on medium-sized towns (Biarez et al., 1973; Huet et al., 1977) or on the new urban regions created by industrial expansion such as Dunkirk (Castells and Godard, 1974; Veltz, 1977) Fos (Bleitrach and Chenu, 1979).

The international dissemination of this body of work soon earned its authors the title of ‘the French school of marxist urban sociology’. Its theoretical approach to problems fitted in with that which was being developed elsewhere, in particular in the UK, Italy, the USA and several Latin American countries. Marxist- inspired urban research thus became an international movement and gained institutional positions, in particular within the International Sociological Associa- tion. It was, paradoxically, at this very moment that French urban research suddenly entered crisis.

I1 Reversal of the situation and the eclipse of French urban research, 1975-1987

1

The first signs of a new period began in the second half of the 1970s and by the start of the 1980s it had become clear that ‘urban marxism’ had had its day. Urban research as a specific field was in decline, the research ‘milieu’ which had been established had become dispersed and the theoretical approaches to problems, which up until then had been dominant, were contested from within as well as from without. It is the process of this eclipse, both institutional and political as well as intellectual, that I will now attempt to analyse.

That a turning point was reached around 1975 will hardly come as a surprise. Historians of the future will no doubt have a better appreciation of how the entry

The start of the crisis


of world capitalism into a long period of crisis and reorganization produced profound effects in all areas of social life. What cannot be denied is that the conditions under which urban research had developed in France underwent major changes.

Accelerating a trend visible for several years, the industrial depression was accompanied by a sudden end to urban growth and a modification of its form. Not only did the decline of the traditional industrial regions turn into a real collapse but the ultramodern complexes which had just been constructed on a massive scale, in particular in the steel industry and the petrochemical industry, suddenly went into crisis. The major urbanization operations headed for failure and were suspended or slowed down. The new towns and large blocks of flats gave way to the scattered construction of detached houses in distant suburbs and urban renovation and rehabilitation, mainly speculative, of existing properties. The public housing sector was condemned to wither away and urban infrastructure policies to be sacrificed on the altar of financial austerity. Financial capital turned away from house building which it had taken over 10 years to control. President Giscard d’Estaing, elected in 1974, was a symbol of the new urban policy accompanying the crisis. The ending of major prdgrammes was justified by speeches about slower growth and the quality of life, the abandonment of gaullist planning ambitions and their replacement by decentralization of urban policies to the local level. At the same time the social movements which had developed over the previous decade, the consequences of accelerated urbanization, faded away and a fair number of the demands expressed by the ecology groups were taken up by the new government policy. Although they had a more ‘social’ emphasis, the left-wing governments which followed the election of MittCrand to the presidency in 1981, also followed a policy consistent with a slowdown in urban growth whilst speeding up the process of decentralization of power to local authorities.

The result of this policy was that the central planning bodies set up in the 1960s were disbanded or became dormant and there was an associated reduction in urban research funding and urban research programmes were redirected. The teams which had administered them over the previous 10 years were dispersed. Urban research as set up by the state from nothing was bound to fall apart when the state withdrew its support. This turning point did, however, leave one minor problem unresolved: what to do with the hundreds of researchers who had previously been paid for by the authorities. The solution adopted in 1975, mainly as a result of pressure from the unions involved, had been to transfer the majority of this personnel to the traditional research institutions - in essence the CNRS - and to allow the others to wither away. However, the return of the prodigal son was not without consequences for the future direction of research. The professional esteem previously assured by a privileged relationship with the authorities had disappeared and a new legitimacy had to be fought for by the newcomers within the traditional academic framework. As it was, urban research had developed on the fringes of general debates within the disciplines involved,


had produced only a limited number of publications recognized by the university world, and had kept the researchers working in its field outside of the usual channels of access to the institutional authorities. At the same time, after the shock and reforms of 1968, the French university system was seeing a marked restoration of the old guard. This was less marked, however, in the CNRS and in particular in a discipline like sociology. However, for better or for worse, the urban research milieu created by the funding boom of the 1970s had melted away into the academic institutions and had become subject to their professional standards.

Clearly the changed situation not only affected urban policy and research institutions. With the crisis, the developed industrial countries in the 1980s have probably entered a new historical period. A cycle of rising social conflict began around 1960, together with a strengthening of workers’ movements and the appearance of new forms of protest against the establishment. Now the period of capitalist restructuring which began in the middle of the 1970s in turn produced its own effects. In France this was seen at the soci level by the weakening of both unions and the ‘new social movements’, and on the political level by the defeat of left-wing governments (1981-86) and the collapse of the Communist Party. It is in such a context that we must appreciate the weakening of marxist ideas which had to re-evaluate their attainments and limits if they were to renew themselves and continue to be effective and thus face the current ideological fashion which sought to bury them.

2 Interpretation of ‘urban marxism’ in the 1970s

In fact the crisis of French urban research was not only the result of institutional conditions which were now unfavourable. It was also a crisis of theory, i.e. the questioning of the subjects that it had constructed. The intellectual arena of the 1970s enabled certain ‘things’ to be ‘seen’ and hid others, which later came to the forefront. These modifications in the intellectual vision that a society has of itself take place from time to time and in fact represent the very history of the social sciences. In order to interpret them we must attempt to understand how the subject matter of ‘science’ is born in the interaction between the world of research and the real world. Theoretical language always expresses something other than that which it believes. It can only transpose into the intellectual domain, in accordance with the specific rules of this domain, an historical situation, i.e. the practical connection with reality of those who discuss the subject. In order to interpret the urban marxism of the 1970s it is, therefore, necessary to clarify the relation between the content and the actual conditions of its production.

The prime condition for a new definition of the town as a subject for research was the interaction between the state as planning authority and a generation of researchers during a period of rising social tensions. The content, limits and fragile nature of the theoretical expressions of the time were written into this


situation. In other words, it seems to me that the eventual dissolution of the town as subject, as constituted in the 1970s, was the effect of the very conditions of its construction. The state, confronted with a major social crisis, chose the town as a priority field of research, whilst the researchers looked at the ‘urban question’ as the essential subject of the theory. Thus the contradictions of capitalist urbanization and its state forms of regulation were placed in the centre of intellectual discussion, hiding other less visible subjects.

The reinsertion of urban phenomena into the analysis of capitalist global structures enabled positivism to be placed in question but posed the unavoidable epistemological question: could the town be considered as a scientific subject? In other words is urban sociology a discipline founded on theory or simply an empirically defined field of research? Basically, the problem was not new and in the past answers had been provided whenever an attempt had been made to construct a ‘town science’ as an instrument to be used in a social transformation project. Thus, at the start of the twentieth century we had ‘civics as applied sociology’ from Patrick Geddes or the ‘urbanism’ of Marcel PoEte and then in the 1920s the ‘urban culture’ of the Chicago sociologists. In respect of the theoretical definition of its subject, French urban research of the 1970s divided into two main schools. Their opposition expressed different practical relations with the field of politics, but they had in common the fact that it was precisely politics, hence the state, which was at the heart of the questions that they wanted to answer.

The researchers belonging to the first school, represented in particular by Castells, defined towns in terms of collective consumption. By this theoretical decision they gave themselves the means not only of legitimizing the existence of ‘urban sociology’ but also of understanding the emergence of new social movements. Such an approach thus corresponded to a political sensitivity shared both by the militants of the extreme left as well as part of the noncommunist left. This school of research centred its analysis on forms of social conflict which were not born in the workplace from labour problems, were not based on any single class and which did not adopt the traditional forms of organization and political expression of the workers’ movement. By basing a system of sociology on a definition of the town as the collective consumption space, it was possible to give a name to this reality which represented both the future and hope, in other words to invent ‘urban social movements’. The edifice therefore rested on a very singular historical conjuncture and its fragile nature became evident with the end of growth. The social movements in question lost their strength, partly because they had achieved results and had become institutionalized, and partly because the problems which had given rise to them had changed form. The question of employment was henceforth at the centre of popular concern and the control of unemployment had become an essential aspect of public policy. Accelerated restructuring of the spatial division of labour meant that the town as an industrial production space had to be rediscovered.

As for the researchers who belonged to the second school, they expected social

638 A history of urban research: the French experience since I965

change to result from political change. Generally inspired by the theory of state- monopoly capitalism, as it was being developed at the time by the economists of the French Communist Party, they favoured analysis of the mechanisms of capital accumulation and the reproduction of labour power in the towns and the accompanying public policies. It was a question of uncovering the roots of the ‘urban crisis’ and of defining the new policies enabling a solution to be found. The parallel nature of the conferences on urbanism organized in 1973 and 1974 by the state (‘Urban politics . . .’, 1974) and by communist intellectuals (Marxist Research and Study Centre, ‘To achieve urbanism . . .’, 1974) is from this aspect quite striking. With this approach the town faded away as a specific subject. It merely became a suitable ground on which to study general processes at work in a developed capitalist society. This theoretical approach was a factor in the disintegration of urban research when the situation changed. Moreover, it pushed to the extreme limit a common characteristic of marxist-inspired work of this period - the fascination with the state. Here again historical experience was to lead to a serious re-evaluation: with the failure of left-wing governments in France it had to be accepted that nowhere in Europe had parties claiming to represent the workers’ movement been able to occupy the state in order to carry out a policy of radical social change.

Whether it favoured the study of urban social movements or that relating to the contradictions of capitalist accumulation, urban research in the 1970s did in all these cases define its tasks from the subject which was most visible at the time: the state, its policies and its ‘crisis’ (Poulantzas, 1976). This subject hid others, in particular all the social realities which could not be seen from the practical classifications produced by the state itself and which, perhaps, enable us to understand just how a political crisis can find a ‘conservative’ solution.

At this point we cannot avoid a disturbing question. Marxist-inspired urban research was born in France as elsewhere from a curious collaboration between public authorities and a generation of young, radicalized graduates. The paradox is probably only apparent: we have seen how, in the French case, a modernizing technocracy, confronted with new social and administrative problems, had for a short period of time mobilized the former 1968 students against the resistance of the academic system. But we should assess the consequences of this situation on the direction of research and on the theory itself. The controlling authorities wanted data which would inform public policy, the researchers responded with a critical analysis of these very policies, of their social determinants and of their effects. This confrontation had an inevitable consequence, although it was only vaguely perceived at the time: the intellectual field of research was structured by a state definition of ‘problems’ and, therefore, by a tailoring of social reality to correspond to the requirements of state policies. Here again, this was nothing new. The social sciences were born of an eminently practical project, that of the social reformers at the end of the nineteenth century, soon taken over by the organization of the modern welfare states (Topalov, 1985). In spite of the independent nature of the field where these intellectual discussions, or we might


say theories, of society were produced, at no time was it possible to understand the development of these disciplines independently of their relations with the practical categories produced in the operation of the social system by the authorities.

Thus I do not believe that the development of urban research between the early 1960s and the late 1970s in many countries can be regarded simply as the consequence of an explosion of urban problems to which answers had to be found. Between reality and the words society uses to describe this reality there is an essentiaI gap, since the forms of representation are inevitably organized by the practical relations between people. However, in the twentieth century, the social problems to be resolved were defined in relation to the instruments of action which were available within the state. If the ‘urban question’ became a central concern in the west for 20 years, it was because the town was considered to be the strategic location for the state management of social conflicts. And if urban policies had become the principal subject for research, it was because this method of management encountered major difficulties. The golden age of urban planning, during which the technologies invented by the social reformers at the start of this century were finally put into effect on a large scale, was at the same time the moment when the question of society’s responses to planning could no longer be avoided, unless, of course, the project was abandoned. This was in fact the solution adopted a short time later which was to radically transform research conditions in this field.

3 New subjects

From the second half of the 1970s new research trends began to be seen which were to become the main themes of the 1980s. Some developed within the marxist school, for which the social stabilization, which followed the turning point of 1975, again posed a classic question: how was the extreme strength of the capitalist order and its capacity for adaptation and restructuring to be understood? Other developments, however, had as their point of departure a more or less radical rejection of the marxist viewpoint, either by rival forms of critical thought or by multiple variants of a positivism which returned in force after a long period of apparent eclipse.

In spite of the diversity of these developments, it seems to me that they have a common factor. The fundamental question, which determined the choice of subjects for research had changed. In the 1970s it was political change, in the 1980s the question became social reproduction. So today we need to understand how the rapid transformations which we see at certain levels of reality are compatible with the stability of certain fundamental social relations. This shift in viewpoint has uncovered a series of new questions and new subjects.


4

The structural crisis into which world capitalism again entered about 12 years ago was accompanied by major changes in the division of labour. This historical experience laid down a clear task for the marxist school and has led to an initial series of re-evaluations.

First of all, the transformations in industry and the services representing the environment have moved to the forefront of concern. In France this trend has been favoured since 1981 by new research programmes financed by the state. These have resulted in the shift of many researchers from urban problems to industrial problems and, to a lesser extent, a rediscovery of the town itself as a production space.

In addition, it has gradually become apparent that the root of the present crisis is a mutation of the accumulation regime, i.e., above all a change in the forms of the social and spatial division of labour. These developments have contributed to a rejection of the economism of part of the research of the 1970s, i.e., the tendency to define capitalist contradictions in terms of the circulation, level and unequal distribution of profit and not in terms of production itself. Hence the success of research based either on the analysis of the actual work processes, in particular, those involving automation (Freyssenet, 1981), or on the concept of regulation, in particular those dealing with the crisis in the fordist accumulation system (Aglietta, 1976). This work opens the way to a study of urban lifestyles based on the realities of industrial work (Campagnac and Tabary-Taveau, 1979; Bobroff, Campagnac and Veltz, 1980).

Finally, the need to interpret the crisis was one of the factors which contributed to returning historical work to the forefront of research. If it is true that we are currently living through the end of a long period of capitalism, it becomes essential to study how it was established. Hence the development of research into the origins of forms of the division of labour based on mechanization and on the establishment in the 1930s and 1940s of the fordist mode of accumulation regulation. However, in France this has not yet led to coherent work on the history of urbanization based on these new concepts.

The question of the crisis and changes in the wage structure

5 The question of politics

Marxist-inspired urban research of the 1970s had left aside the question of politics and had concentrated on the study of policies. It regarded the state as a set of systems and practices acting on civil society and not, as is also true in western democracies, an authority accepted by society as legitimate. Most work thus moved directly from studies of class interests to an examination of the ‘objective effects’ of urban policies on these class interests. This favoured a shift from a theory of contradictions to a functionalist theory. The politico-administrative process in the formation of policies and the very reproduction of political legitimacy were considered to be secondary. At the same time an essential question from the point of view of the marxist school was avoided: how was it


that capitalist urban policies undoubtedly give rise to social movements but do not substantially weaken popular submission or adhesion to the overall social and political order?

Hence the need for a reconsideration of the relations between politics and society which brings us back to the ideas already being expressed by Gramsci at the time of European stabilization in the 1920s. The domination by one class of the state was based on a hegemony initially constructed in civil society. Ideologies and political practices were rooted in the fabric of society’s institutions, the social relations which were being established therein and the aspects of daily life. Several approaches have converged on this new view of politics. The development of work on local authorities is partially the result of the situation created by the policy of decentralization begun in France by the left in 1982. But the growth of the ‘local’ theme was also a reaction against previous research which had focused on the overall policies of central government. The concept of the state has thus sometimes been used rather sparingly. In other cases it was only a question of a difference of emphasis. Thus marxist urban sociologists have turned away from national analyses and begun to study town councils which were becoming the favoured field of observation for the formation of political hegemonies (Lojkine, 1980; PrCteceille, 1985; 1988). Here a fruitful encounter took place with historians who were working either on municipal socialism (Meuret, 1982) or on the distribution of the Communist Party in the ‘red’ urban councils between the two wars, and more generally on the links between daily life, associative life and political life at the local level (Girault, 1977; Brunet, 1980; Fourcaut, 1983, Fourcaut, 1988). In addition, certain conventional work dealing with electoral sociology was moving towards taking account of the social determinants of political behaviour, in particular the mass distribution of housing property (Capdevielle , 1986).

In this research, an even more fundamental question has arisen involving the nature of the political process itself in representative democracies. The democratic state is supposed to represent the national will and, in its modem forms, the needs of the population. The political institutions are based on a process of delegation of power which implies specific effects, in particular in the definition of social needs. This process has become in its turn a subject of research (Godard and Pendarits, 1979).

6 The question of power

The foci of power extend far beyond the state and the geography of power systems is not only that of social classes. This thesis, reformulated in France by Michael Foucault in particular, radically contested the marxist point of view of the 1970s and has greatly contributed to redrawing the research agenda. Once again, theory attempted to give a meaning to an historical experience, that of the revolts which since the 1960s had broken out with regularity in the prison system. The antipsychiatric movement and the prison riots drew attention to relations of


domination which had been overlooked until then. It was now recognised that the silent devices of discipline, which were not contested since they were based on a scientific treatment of subjects classified as ‘abnormal’, were perhaps the very basis of social order. Once the question had been expressed in these terms nothing could fail to be affected - neither the medical system, the school, housing or even the family. In their own way, the feminist movements posed a parallel question by fighting a form of domination which was clearly distinct from class relations.

This new field of research was opened in France by a series of studies inspired by Foucault which attempted to demonstrate that the collective equipment that marxist urban research claimed to be both necessary yet insufficient were in fact devices for normalization, the ‘equipments of power’ (Fourquet and Murard, 1977). This line of research gave rise to a series of research studies on the genealogy of school (Quemen, 1976), of social housing (Murard and Zylberman, 1976), of family policies (Donzelot, 1977; Joseph and Fritsch, 1977) and public health (Murard and Zylberman, 1977). At the end of the 1970s this point of view, which was radically antistate, was in accord with the doubts of a section of the technocracy whose serene belief in modernism had encountered crisis with the decline of state planning and the amval of austerity policies (Conan and Scheer, 1977).

Another intellectual tradition from 1968 also encountered this question of power. Wary of organized forms of collective action and sceptical as to the effectiveness of disciplinary systems, it attempted to highlight the spontaneous and daily forms of popular resistance to class domination, both at work and outside work (Cottereau, 1980). This point of view, which returned to the old tradition of UK and North American social history, led to studies of the workers’ movement no longer only ‘from above’ but primarily from ‘the grass roots’, from the daily aspect of class relations, the basis of the most visible collective movements (Perrot, 1974; Cottereau, 1986). Popular practices in the town thus become subjects of history (Perrot, 1981; Garden and Lequin, 1984; Magri, 1986).

This same point of view also led to a re-examination of the action of the dominant classes which was not only exercised in the workplace or in politics but which also sought to effect a deep transformation in the daily lives of the popular classes outside the workplace. Working from this hypothesis it is possible to reread the history of all social policies (Topalov, 1985) and in particular that of urban policies. The origins of modern urbanism are henceforth analysed as a feature of a reforming movement which, throughout this century, has worked to change popular ways of life and the relations between classes (De Michelis and Teyssot, 1979; Gaudin, 1979; 1985; Burlen, 1987; Magri and Topalov, 1987; 1988).

7 The question of practices

Urban research in the 1970s looked at urbanization, public policy and social


movements as the effects of structural dynamics, as processes without a subject. It postulated that social practices resulted from an interaction between the characteristics of group position within the social structure and the external conditions produced by the logic of accumulation and state policies. At the same time it dispensed with any empirical study of these practices and consequently any interpretation of their diversity.

However, social stabilization has placed the question of daily practices back on the agenda. It forces us to take account of their permanence even whilst the ‘objective’ conditions of existence undergo profound changes. It also obliges us to think about their individual diversity even among those in similar locations in the social structure. The question of the production of individuals is thus posed at the same time as that of social reproduction. In one way the current development of work on ‘ways of life’ is a search for answers to these questions. As soon as these are posed the structuralist position encounters an obvious limit - it must admit that these practices cannot be deduced from the positions of agents in the structure (Pendari&s, 1980).

This questioning is first a result of the discovery that the existence of collective equipment does not directly determine the social modes of its use. Between the practice and its conditions mediation must be introduced (Pingon-Charlot and Rendu, 1982; Tabard et a f . , 1987). Thus, the purchase of a house or flat can have a very different meaning depending not only on the class position of the buyer but also on the particular background of the household (Godard and Cuturello, 1980). Cohabitation in a large block of flats presents difficulties which demonstrate the diversity of the resources acquired by each group during its past history (Pingon, 1981). Moreover, the highlighting of the specific nature of the position of women in all social practices, in particular in work (Barrtre-Maurisson et al., 1984) also leads to an account being taken of the plurality of the social relations which determine ways of life.

Thus we discover that daily practices present a coherent picture which must be taken into account. Although many studies fail to avoid the tautologies of ordinary culturism, others are more concerned with a study of the social production of individual provision (Bertaux, 1977; Bouffartigue et at., 1986). Such research has multiple variants but in particular owes much to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The method of life histories and the study of family paths are used to make progress with this problem by attempting to link the analysis of class positions, changes in the historical situation and the formation of individual destinies (Bouffartigue et al., 1984; Pingon, 1987).

This research also indicates a way of going beyond the functionalism and economism which marked the marxisms of the 1970s. The workers cease to be regarded as simple labour power, i.e., from the aspect of their function for capital and as just the subjects of practices. Class practices do not necessarily take the form of collective action since popular responses to situations are above all daily and silent. But, nevertheless, they contribute to defining the progress of events, including accumulation. Thus, the effectiveness of the obstacles set up by the


nineteenth-century peasant workers to proletarianization is a key to understanding of French industrial backwardness (Noiriel, 1986), and the policies of steel industry bosses can only be understood if the everyday way of life of the workers is looked upon as a form of struggle (Freyssenet, 1980).

111 Conclusion

There can be no doubt that the agenda built up by the marxist movement of the 1970s has disintegrated. But in what direction are current developments moving? Just as the owl of Minerva only took to the wing at dusk, so this question can have no real answer at the present time. Nevertheless, since it is difficult to entirely avoid, I believe that it can be looked at in two ways.

On the one hand, we are witnessing a rehabilitation of empiricism, the infinite description of unconnected facts. This represents a return of the individual to the centre of the stage after the golden period of structuralism which left the individual in the wings. In fact, over a period of about 30 years, by rejecting the essential assumption of positivism and perhaps also the more basic experience of modem common sense, the ‘real’ individual had ceased to be considered as the ultimate base of social action. This theoretical revolution began when linguistics had taken as its subject the system of language rather than the diversity of speech. It then spread throughout the social sciences. The Annals school had shaken history by showing that under the froth of events there existed the slow movement of social structures and that historical subjects are acted upon as well as having the role of actors. Structuralist anthropology analysed systems of kinship where the agents were only supports and mythical constructions which ‘thought’ through their speakers. The return from Lacan to Freud envisaged the individual as a necessary illusion resulting from the hypothesis of the unconscious, itself ‘structured as a language’. Althusser’s reading of Mam was a ‘theoretical antihumanism’ which placed the objective development of the contradictions of modes of production at the root of historical movement. Foucault demonstrated power systems in which the partners were involved unawares. Even literature took part in this movement with the abolition of the narrator and the subject of perception in the ‘new novel’.

The present return to the individual may be regarded as a battle conducted by positivisms rising from their ashes to sweep away the critical thoughts of previous decades which had been expressed in France by the various types of structuralism and mamism. Thus, in the intellectual field, just as in the social and political fields, there exist periods of reaction or even restoration. One aspect of the return to the individual would appear to be the rehabilitation of the positivist view that the individual is the ultimate subject of action and is aware of his acts. Given this, the social sciences can return peacefully to methods and theories constructed using educated versions of common sense.

Thus current French urban research has abandoned itself to the charms of


ethnographic observation (PCtonnet, 1982; 1985) and again adopted the language of culturalism (Verret, 1979) which, incidently, sometimes produces admirable books. It has discovered the Chicago school as though it were something new and has chosen to ignore macrosocial phenomena, deciding instead to concentrate on the ‘local object’, the ‘microsocial’ and ‘daily’ aspect of life (‘La Vie Quoti- dienne . . .’ 1978; De Ceteau, 1980). The myth of the benevolent state has been resurrected and the question of public policies is sometimes posed in terms very close to those of the 1960s (Imbert and Chombart de Lauwe, 1982). In addition, we see a surprising unawareness of the results of 10 years of marxist-inspired urban research, in particular on the part of certain historians and geographers of the twentieth-century town (Roncayolo, 1985).

On the other hand, other current developments are the outcome of a critical examination of the results of mamist- or structuralist-inspired work, and an attempt to go beyond the limits of such work whilst retaining its positive achievements. It seems clear that the new paradigms which have emerged from this challenge have not yet acquired the scope and influence of the previous ones. We can try to make sure that they succeed but, as always, man proposes, history disposes. Centre de Sociologie Urbaine, Paris, France

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a history of urban research: the french experience since 1965

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