France’s Concrete Frontier: Gender, Family, and Social Policy in Suburban High-Rise Communities, 1945-1975 Postwar French technocrats imagined suburban high-rise communities or grands ensembles d’habitations as cornerstones of a welfare state committed to the preservation of the family’s caring function and the promotion of social peace. Families of all social classes would reside in well-equipped rental or rent-controlled apartments until financially prepared to purchase a condominium [la copropriété]. Today, these communities evoke the hyperbolic images of flame engulfed vehicles and youth riots. Concrete Frontier chronicles the “golden age” of the grands ensembles with three questions in mind: what vision of society inspired a commitment to the grands ensembles, what shapes of domestic life did they engender, and what cultural processes gave rise to their abandonment? Why the Grands Ensembles? This project holds a conceit at its core: the state and its institutions whether operating in the free market or otherwise dictate how and where social groups live; indeed, the very contours of built environments. Housing policies, articulated or unarticulated, hold the potential to improve the everyday living conditions of all citizens or encourage psychological and physical harm. Well-though housing policies can correct the injustices of capitalism and imbalances of private ownership to offer all citizens equality of opportunity for self-realization by correcting the injustices of capitalism and private ownership which facilitate gender, generational, social, and racial segregation. Since the Second World War, North American and European liberal, continental, and social-democratic nations labored to improve the nuclear family’s access to comfortable, modern housing. Each nation had its own understanding of the role of public and private development, the importance of social housing, and the encouragement of home ownership. These policies have been praised as a significant humanitarian effort which enriched families health and sense of self-worth or a misguided failure leaving a legacy of unsustainable suburban sprawl and aesthetically insufferable high-rise towers. France’s suburban grands ensemble; often confused with social or subsidized housing called habitation à loyer modéré [HLM]which made up only a percentage of buildings in communities, are an interesting object of analysis because they were an alternative housing pathway abandoned. Today, these communities are too frequently associated with images of flame engulfed vehicles, youth riots, and, to xenophobes, the dangers of Islam. In truth, a visit to one of suburban France’s grands ensemble may come as a shock to a suburban American because they would discover an extensive athletic, civic, cultural, transportation, and educational infrastructure in many contemporary communities. As many scholars have shown, one should not consider suburban grands ensembles or even isolated high-rise buildings with large immigrant populations the French equivalent of American urban racial and economic segregation. Nonetheless, a majority of the French perceive high-rise communities as incompatible with a good life. Concrete Frontier suggests that the French experiment with modernist collective housing need not have been abandoned or deemed a failure. Instead, it shows how policies failed to reconcile the housing model originally organized around a male-breadwinner and female domestic caregiver with the encouragement of women’s labor market participation. It also identifies the state’s ambiguous commitment to the model (shown in its reorientation of general housing policy towards the single-family home despite the breakdown of the nuclear family model) and the general lack of solidarity for suburban collective housing among academics and young adults. Dissertation Chapters Housing is a State Affair: Family and Housing Policy in Postwar France La belle vie: The New Man on France’s Concrete Frontier Her Housing is an Utter Horror to Her: Adaptation, Alienation, and Women’s Needs in a Parisian High-Rise Community Nous refusons d’être SARCELLISÉS’: The Gendered Critique of Modernist High-Rise Living Can We Live Happily in Concrete?: Masculinity, Domesticity, and the Pavilion Home Back http://www.unc.edu/~mulvey/MichaelJMulvey/Home.htmlshapeimage_3_link_0