Thibault Tellier, who publishes History of the suburbsHe is a professor of contemporary history at Sciences Po Rennes. Specialist in city policies and social housing, published in June The Child of La Courneuve. 1983, assassination of Toufik Ouannès (Michalón). Loïc Vadelorge, professor of contemporary history at the Gustave-Eiffel University, is, since 2019, scientific director of the Urban Futures laboratory of excellence, whose work is at the origin of the collective book. (Re)think cities. Cross perspectives on the history and possible futures of cities, theme of the 27thmy edition of the Rendez-vous de l’histoire de Blois.
One of the axes of “(Re)thinking cities” consists of rejecting the principle of a blank slate to imagine the cities of the future. “A city can never be completely remade,” writes Loïc Vadelorge. How do we explain that this dream of reinvention ex nihilo is so omnipresent today?
Loïc Vadelorge: This is clearly linked to the imperatives of the ecological transition, whose urgency is such that we come to think that we have to redo everything. However, in Northern countries the buildings are already there and are evidently not adapted to climate change. Unfortunately, many public actors do not take this into account. For them, it is enough to produce “eco-neighborhoods”, completely new urban forms, as if there were a magic solution that avoids confronting heritage. This is an illusion, and urban research can help distance ourselves from this type of approach, remembering the complexity of the problems.
Thibault Tellier, “The history of the suburbs” is full of cities of the future that have disappeared today, the suburbs having been a privileged field of experimentation throughout the 20th century.my century. What forms did these more or less utopian projects take?
Thibault Tellier: The term “utopia” may be surprising when it comes to them, but the large complexes built from the 1950s onwards – what we now call “neighborhoods” – seem to me to be part of this. Certainly, they initially responded to an emergency, given the housing crisis that affected post-war France, but there was indeed a utopian dimension to the idea that the suburbs of the future should allow greater numbers of people to finally access modernity.
I could also mention the new cities – a topic that Loïc Vadelorge knows well – whose creation, in the 1970s, was accompanied by a whole discourse that presented them as a new starting point. What had not been achieved with the large complexes was going to be achieved thanks to this new urban form. In reality, the new cities were not so radically different from the large complexes. But what is especially striking is this regular return, which is not new, of the dream of recreating cities based on a new model.
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