This chapter problematizes what it means for the Paris banlieue architecture to perform or fail. It directs the discourse away from good and bad design by establishing more sophisticated frames of reference. I posit that spaces in the Paris banlieue are divided into two broad categories: spaces of power and spaces of vulnerability. I then explore these categories through a close examination of three films – Playtime (1967), La Haine (1995), and Entre les Murs (2008). Specifically, I look at the films through the lens of sociological writings about the production and manipulation of space, and then use insights gathered from this analysis to construct a mise-en-scene of the late 20th century Paris banlieue.
All three films deal with the challenge of Modernism, the Paris banlieue and the manipulation of space to impose order on society. Each film begins with a utopian authority that strives to civilize people and to “integrate” the outsider into modern French society. Architecture and the built environment are key elements in this process. In each film, a socially-subversive rational architecture, resulting from a top-down process of design, attempts to create a corresponding perfection in society, but fails. Its inhabitants consider these interventions condescending and rebel against them: in the language of Michel de Certeau, these inhabitants represent “local authorities” [1] who transgress the spatial structures imposed by architects and urban planners. According to de Certeau, designed urban and architectural spaces attempt to implement a uniform scheme in order to predict and direct movement through a city. He posits that inhabitants of these designed spaces are diverse and their movements through the space are unpredictable. These local authorities, he argues, often find short cuts and improvised routes that were never intended by the official authorities who designed the space.
In each film, local authorities undermine a strained social structure, leading it to degenerate into dystopia, and bringing both society and architecture down with it. If we are to study how local authorities undermine the grand scheme of planned space, it is important to first identify what makes the space of the Paris banlieue subversive. In 2005, Steven Wassenaar argued that social housing in the Paris banlieue has been actively used by the French state as a tool to control society. He claimed that the state is “blind to the uninterrupted urban fabric… in which 4 million survive in 200 gray, merged ‘little towns’ – actually neighborhoods of Paris.”[2] As Wassenaar later points out, and as the three films illustrate, the state is not really blind but is instead intentionally and frantically attempting to preserve a status quo about what it means to be French. “These paupers,” explains Wassenaar, “mostly of non-French origins, are forcibly and contrary to any logic barred from becoming authentic Parisians and so from housing quality, transport, education, work, culture, the feeling of being fully-fledged citizens.”[3] The design of social housing reinforces the class-based spatial segregation that began with Haussmann’s transformation of the city in the 19th century. It isolates its residents and separates them from the city of Paris. It increases their dependence on the government and further lowers their social status in France.
The spatial oppression that begins in the physical sphere is accentuated in the symbolic. Throughout the last half-century, the material condition typified by the Grands Ensembles architecture has contributed to the production of anomie, which the sociologist Émile Durkheim describes as a sense of disconnected listlessness resulting from a lack of place in society: a state of existence that leads to dissatisfaction, conflict and deviance.[4] The discontent the residents felt towards the Grands Ensembles was projected onto the architecture, which represented the only tangible and permanent symbol of their oppression.
The architectural forms of the banlieue contribute to the production of anomie because too often they are repetitive and dull. In the language of Henri Lefebvre, they are products and not works. In 1973, Lefebvre wrote about old urban centers like Venice and contrasted them the production of new urban spaces, such as the Paris banlieue. While he defined the former as a work, he called the new space a product: produced spaces of the twentieth century “can be reproduced exactly, and [are] in fact the result of repetitive acts and gestures.”[5] Lefebvre explained that nature was the raw material for these produced spaces. Through a process of abstraction, nature was transformed into a produced space with rigid boundaries and prescribed pathways. Produced spaces of the Paris banlieue are oppressive spaces: they induce weakness and vulnerability in their inhabitants because they limit freedom. They strip the inhabitant of privacy and regiment how daily life is acted out. The inhabitant is vulnerable because he or she is always under surveillance.
While produced spaces attempt to orchestrate aspects of their inhabitants’ lives, their ability to subvert society is limited. Lefebvre explains this limitation in produced space’s ability to fully direct its inhabitants’ lives by introducing the idea of social space. Social space is an abstract space that penetrates the seemingly inflexible produced space:
Visible boundaries, such as walls and enclosures in general, give rise for their part to an appearance of separation between spaces where in fact what exists is an ambiguous continuity… the places of social space… may be intercalated, combined, superimposed – they may even sometimes collide.[6]
Social space is difficult to plan and control because it results from the spontaneous movement and interactions of individuals that inhabit a produced space. This idea of an intangible, nebulous social space superimposed on the produced space of the banlieue is echoed in Michel de Certeau’s work. De Certeau expands on Foucault’s theory of space, in which “mechanisms and technical procedures… merely by their organization of ‘details’ [are capable] of transforming a human multiplicity into a ‘disciplinary’ society and of managing, differentiating, classifying, and hierarchizing all deviances.”[7] While Foucault theorized about how the organization of space allows authorities to channel power, de Certeau wrote about the transgressions that occur in violation of totalitarian spatial structures. He qualified Foucault’s idea that the manipulation of space would directly result in the manipulation of social power. He did this by introducing the “local authority” within a grand spatial scheme: an individual player that inhabits the scheme and transgresses it by means of improvisations and shortcuts that were never part of the architect’s original plan:
I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the “geometrical” or “geographical” space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions. These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations (“ways of operating”), to “another spatiality” (an “anthropological,” poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.[8]
Of course, the social space and the subversive local authority are abstract and difficult to pin down. When space is flattened, as in a two-dimensional plan, these elements are undetectable. Consequently, their power to undermine authoritarian spatial schemes lies in their invisibility.
In discussions of space where power is operational, it is important to avoid collapsing (1) the urbanism of the banlieue and (2) the architecture of social housing projects that are situated within it. Urbanism produces the conditions for architecture. Hence, an urbanism of exclusion produces the condition for exclusionary architecture. The isolated and segregated nature of the banlieue leads to mass-produced architecture that, like a machine, is intended solely to house the working class. While social housing architecture of the Paris banlieue superficially seems to confer power on its residents by providing them a modern home to live in, it also strips them of power by attempting to manipulate their actions through the design of space. In 1997, Pieter Uittenhove explained the phenomenon of exclusion in the context of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre’s conceptions of space: Foucault views space as an “instrument for separating, disciplining, classifying… Prisons, hospitals, public housing and lunatic asylums are all forms of social control;” and Lefebvre sees the use of “space as a representation of power.”[9] It is not just the possession of a space for living that confers social status upon citizens: social status is also represented by the manner in which inhabited space is occupied. Therefore, the physical nature of a space and the symbolism associated with it together determine the quality of lived experience. In the three films I will proceed to analyze, inhabitants find themselves trapped in produced spaces of vulnerability. Like Michel de Certeau’s local authorities, however, they are able to reclaim these spaces and find within them moments of self-empowerment.
Image 1. Chaos in the restaurant in Playtime
In Playtime (1967), Jacques Tati playfully employs a hyperbolic representation to critique the Modern Paris metropolis, where everything looks like everything else.[10] While we catch glimpses of monuments like the Eiffel Tower in fleeting reflections in glass doors, the city we experience is perfectly generic and homogenous—a produced space. The protagonist, the hapless Monsieur Hulot, loses his way in a maze of Modern architecture equipped with the latest technical gadgets. Hulot roams around Paris, mingling with a group of American tourists, constantly being mistaken for someone else, and ultimately finds himself at the opening night of a Modern restaurant and nightclub. At the beginning of the film, the characters’ stiff, mechanical movements complement the straight lines and right angles of the spaces they inhabit. These movements become more and more strained as the film progresses. Near the end of the film, under the pressure of drunken chaos, the architecture itself breaks down—as do all kinds of social barriers.
Image 2. Saïd, an Arab teenager, in a still from La Haine
La Haine (“Hate”), a 1995 film directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, introduces itself to its audience as the “story of a guy who falls from a fifty-storey building.”[11] As the man falls, he repeats to himself: “jusqu'ici tout va bien” (“So far, so good…”). The film records the lives of three young men from the Paris banlieue over a twenty-four hour period: Vinz, a Jew, Saïd, an Arab, and Hubert, a black boxer. The three have grown up in a low-income cité in the banlieue and are representative of the immigrant population that abides there. An oppressive space of the banlieue, coupled with an authoritarian police, force has raised tensions to a critical breaking point. During the riots that took place the night before the film begins, a police officer lost his handgun. Vinz finds this gun and vows to kill a “pig” (the term teenagers use to refer to the French police) if his friend Abdel – who has been beaten by the police – dies in the hospital. The film contrasts the open space of the cité with the congestion of Paris. The space of the cité is a produced space. It has been designed for surveillance and control. While there are many such spaces of vulnerability in the cité there are also some spaces of power which afford residents privacy and provide them with the kind of space that enables them to watch authority.
Image 3. Skeptical students in Mr. Marin’s class, in Entre les Murs
Entre les Murs (“between walls;” English title: The Class), a 2008 film by Laurent Cantet, explores the challenges of a racially-diverse French society through the experience of a French teacher in a peripheral Parisian neighborhood.[12] In it, the social upheaval of a diverse French society is acted out in the space of the classroom. We remain in the same few rooms with the same people for a whole year. With its enclosed courtyard, horizontal windows, bare walls and sterile spaces of surveillance, the architecture of the school – a produced space – sets the stage for the drama. Against the school’s blank walls, time passes and the characters evolve. The architecture is the backdrop to captivating dialogue, moments of silence, and intense action, but it also plays a central role in the film: to create dense, powerful atmosphere. The architecture becomes an objective embodiment of the condescending pedagogical system that the students are struggling against. As the characters evolve, so does the nature of the space they inhabit.
Image 4. Opening scene at the airport, in Playtime
All three films are critical of produced space that attempts to impose order. In Playtime, each architectural element is perfectly aligned. At the beginning of the film, people’s mechanical movements are dictated by the right angles and straight lines of the architecture. The clicking of shoes on the shiny floor of the airport accentuates this harsh and unnatural environment, and the man and woman sitting on leather seats seem uncomfortable, as if they don’t really belong there. The hallway is a stage where everyone is on display, and outsiders are immediately identifiable. That is why the sweeper quickly recedes into one of the smaller corridors. In La Haine and Entre les Murs, the courtyard, surrounded by tall blank walls, functions as a space of vulnerability. It makes characters uneasy and agitated because they are being watched at all times. Unlike the dense urban space of a city where people have the choice of retreating to the privacy of smaller alleys, the characters in these two films are forced to be on display at all times. Ironically, however, the open spaces of the cité in La Haine are no less claustrophobic and oppressive. They allow the police easy access to all public spaces. They also facilitate impromptu barriers and checkpoints so that each movement of the inhabitant can be monitored and controlled.
Image 5. Movement through produced space is directed and observed, in La Haine
Image 6. “Were you at the riots last night?” Still from La Haine
Produced space attempts to control society through top-down interventions that invoke notions of “pedagogy” and “progress.” In a poignant scene in La Haine, we see the protagonists sitting in a small park with a big hippopotamus slide, which feels incongruous with the culture of the cité. The physical space of the town, which is designed to be pedagogical and to facilitate cultural integration, is instead discordant and counterproductive. A car drives up to the park and two reporters point a camera toward the teenagers, asking if they were involved in the riots. This triggers an altercation: “Do we look like thugs? This isn’t a zoo.”
Image 7. “Thro-out, Greek-style.” A Modern gadgets exposition in Playtime
At the gadgets exposition in Playtime, tourists get an education in what it means to be Modern—another citation of this “pedagogical” approach. Likewise, later in the film, the space of the restaurant calls for bourgeois mannerisms and affectations. Monsieur Hulot enters this designed space and disrupts the existing order. He is what Michel de Certeau would describe as a “local authority”:
It is a symptomatic tendency of functionalist totalitarianism (including its programming of games and celebrations) that it seeks precisely to eliminate these local authorities, because they compromise the univocity of the system. Totalitarianism attacks what it quite correctly calls superstitions: supererogatory semantic overlays that insert themselves “over and above” and “in excess,” and annex to a past or poetic realm a part of the land the promoters of technical rationalities and financial profitabilities had reserved for themselves.[13]
By failing to follow the prescribed motions and gestures expected of him, Hulot becomes a threat to the “univocity of the system.” The systems of education that have been put in place in Modern Paris are disrupted by this “superstitious” local authority.
Image 8. Except at the very end of the film, the courtyard is always viewed from above, in Entre les Murs
In Entre les Murs, the classroom itself is a space of hierarchy and pedagogy. The relationship of the architecture to its inhabitants corresponds to the top-down relationship of the teachers with the students. When the film’s protagonist, Mr. Francois Marin, asks the class what words they found difficult, the first word to come up is “condescension.” This is hardly a coincidence. The film proceeds to tackle a series of social issues that echo this sentiment. When the principal of the school enters the classroom, everyone is expected to stand.
Stand up, please. Good morning. That goes for those at the back too. Come on, stand up. Chérif, you heard me? Everyone has to stand. It’s a way of greeting an adult. It doesn’t mean submission or humiliation. Good. Sit back down.
Within the rigid structure of the school, students’ voices and feelings are stifled. When Mr. Marin tries to probe deeper to change the status quo, he goes too far, creating a social space within the produced space, and exposing the ugly truth about French society as a whole: a façade of integration – and of liberté, égalité, fraternité – masks a fractured society divided along lines of race and class. In the process, he ends up hurting his students and himself. The ennui and angst of the teenagers’ lives within these walls is made explicit in the discussion about self-portrait essays:
Boubacar: We just come to school, go home, eat and sleep.
Mr. Marin: Fine. The bare facts of your life are dull. But what you feel is interesting.
Boubacar: That’s my business.
Ideas of respect, discipline, humiliation, punishment, revenge, shame and submission are upheaved and reassessed. What happens when a teacher fails to follow codes of society? Is he immune from censure? In an interesting twist of events, the students teach Mr. Marin as much as he teaches them.
The spaces of all three films manipulate the visual landscape, and in doing so, enable surveillance. Lefebvre identifies this “pronounced visual character” as an element of produced spaces:
They are made with the visible in mind: the visibility of people and things, of spaces and of whatever is contained by them. The predominance of visualization (more important than ‘spectacularization,’ which in any case is subsumed by it) serves to conceal repetitiveness.[14]
Image 9. In the produced space of Playtime, people’s lives are on display
The glass doors and windows of Playtime produce translations, reflections, and refractions that disorient the inhabitant and enable constant supervision. Everyone’s activities are exposed and juxtaposed. The cubicles in the office space and the large windows of the street-side apartments provide occupants with a false sense of privacy while enabling very efficient surveillance. This is similar to Foucault’s analysis of the design of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon which was built in 1785.[15] Foucault describes the architecture of the prison as a metaphor for modern “disciplinary” societies and their tendency to observe and normalize.[16] Even the most private aspects of the inhabitants’ lives and relationships are open to scrutiny. Both in the office and at home, the Modern French people of Tati’s world enjoy putting their Modern lives on display. It is only at the end of the film when all pretense gives way to chaos that we realize how strained their Modern lives are.
In La Haine, we constantly hear the sound of helicopters in the air. Even when I visited Clichy-sous-Bois in 2009, there were helicopters patrolling in the air in broad daylight, their burning gaze as potent as the hot sun. While it is difficult to see that one is being watched from above, the sound of the helicopter gives away the surveyor. The police make constant rounds of the town. According to the regulations of the cité, inhabitants are not allowed to go on the roof. This is important in order to prevent reverse surveillance by the people. As I will discuss later, the roof is a space of power for the inhabitants of the cité.
Image 10. The pedagogical park, a space of vulnerability, in La Haine
Image 11. A hierarchical architecture that facilitates surveillance, in Entre les Murs
The hierarchical space of the school in Entre les Murs is designed for surveillance. The film is literally set within the walls of the classroom, the high walls of the courtyard below, and the walls of the staff rooms. The architecture allows teachers to watch students at all times. The teachers, however, have the luxury of meeting in private. In closed rooms, they discuss policies to better civilize their students. Like France’s social housing reforms and policies regarding the immigrant and working class in general, the school exercises a top-down approach of control in which ordered is imposed and regulated through reward and mostly punishment. A teacher who has had a bad day in class storms into the staff room and calls the students animals:
I’m sick of these clowns. Sick of them. I can’t take it anymore. They’re nothing, they know nothing, they look right through you when you teach them…. I’m not going to help them.
Image 12. Souleymane’s disciplinary hearing, in Entre les Murs
As the school year progresses, things degenerate. All attempts to discipline the teenagers fail.
Khoumba: You’re an angrulo with me. What is this?
Mr. Marin: That’s not true. Try saying it in French. What am I?
Khoumba: “Angrulo.”
Mr. Marin: Say it in everyday French.
Khoumba: You’ve got it in for me. That’s normal French.
Mr. Marin: I just want you to read. I have the right to ask you to read, don’t I?
Khoumba: No.
Mr. Marin: Don’t you think so?
Khoumba: No. No one has read it and you’re picking on me.
Mr. Marin: No I am not. I want to work and I’ve chosen you as I have the right to.
Khoumba: Drop it.
Mr. Marin: Start reading.
Khoumba: I won’t read. You tell me to shut up, then to read. What is this?
Mr. Marin’s character is conflicted. At times he connects well with the students, probing their thoughts with a sincere interest. At other times, he attempts to discipline the class by speaking in terms of rights. By doing so, he sets up a trap for himself. Later in the film, he is reprimanded by everyone for calling two of the girls “skanks.”
Khoumba's is one of a few characters that Cantet explores in depth. When reprimanded in a private meeting by Mr. Marin, Khoumba retorts: “I can’t stay a kid forever.” Later she writes a poignant essay about the dual nature of respect:
Le Respect: Adolescents learn to respect their teachers because of threats or the fear of having problems. For starters, I respect you but respect is mutual. For instance, I don’t say you’re hysterical so why do you say I am. I’ve always respected you so I don’t understand why I have to write this. I know you have it in for me but I don’t know why. I shall sit at the back to avoid any other conflicts unless you come looking for them. I admit I can be insolent, but only when provoked. I won’t look at you again so you can’t say my look is insolent. In theory, in a French class you talk about French, not your grandma, your sister, or girls’ periods. And so, from now on I won’t speak to you again. Signed Khoumba.
Over and above a space of control, the architecture of the school, there exists the more nebulous social space. In this social space “everyday life and its functions are coextensive with, and utterly transformed by, a theatricality as sophisticated as it is unsought, a sort of involuntary mise-en-scéne.” [17]
Image 13. While vision is restricted, sound flows through, creating a social space, in Playtime
While the vision reinforces a prescribed order in the three films, sound is used to undermine or transgress this order. It is an important element that enables the formation of social space. This is because, unlike the straight lines of vision which can be curtailed, sound has a more amorphous form and a fluid trajectory of movement through produced space. In Playtime, the environment of the separated cubicles in the office space is united by the buzz of sounds from all sides. Like images in the glass windows, sounds too are disorienting to Monsieur Hulot. Unlike the images, however, the effects created by sound are unpredictable and unplanned. Their sources are hidden and their effects often undermine the visual order. Where vision is restricted, sound still penetrates. We see, for example, the attempt to create a sound-proof door at the gadgets exposition. The interpenetration of social space in the order of produced space is also evident in awkward interactions and in the way people are often mistaken for each other. These unplanned interactions are also a characteristic of social space for Lefebvre:
Itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others. Among these actions, some serve production, others consumption…social space implies a great diversity of knowledge.[18]
Image 14. The camera soars into the air, triumphantly, as the sound of music fills the courtyard, in La Haine
In La Haine, social space is most evident in moments of violent clash and in rare moments of harmony and coexistence. At one point, a DJ mixes Edith Piaf with a contemporary rap song slandering the French police. He blasts this tune from his window in the cité into the large courtyard outside. For a moment everyone is stunned by its beauty. The camera soars into the air and the banal space of the banlieue becomes beautiful. In the film, art, music and culture separate the people of the banlieue from the bourgeois Parisians. This is evident when the three boys stumble into a chic art exhibition in center of Paris, and react to the paintings with disgust: “awful awful awful.” When politely reminded that “you’re hiding a painting,” Vinz retorts, “you’re the painting.” When the boys are kicked out of the gallery after disrupting the quiet environment and disrespecting both the women and the paintings of bourgeois Paris, the owner shuts the door and sighs: “Off the banlieue.” There is also a poignant and discordant juxtaposition of Vinz in front of a Henri de Miller sculpture in Paris, right after the distraught character is separated from his friends and feels completely hopeless. The sculpture is called “l'Ecoute” (“to listen”).
Image 15. A clash of two social classes and cultures in an art gallery, in La Haine
In Entre les Murs, the classroom is the social space: it is a place where different cultures and identities confront each other, often with a great amount of conflict and hostility about what constitutes “normal.” And that the space, in turn, tries to normalize them by imposing a prescribed sense of who the characters ought to be and how they ought to behave. When asked to make name tags, some immigrant students put flags of their parents’ countries of origin next to their names. The theme of identity, of whether a child feels a sense of belonging to or estrangement from France, is recurrent. When Mr. Marin writes the name Bill in a sentence to explain a word, he triggers the following exchange:
Khoumba: What’s with the Bills?
Mr. Marin: What bills?
Khoumba: The name Bill. You always use weird names.
Mr. Marin: Weird? A recent U.S president was called Bill.
Khoumba: Why don’t you use Aïssata or Rachid or Ahmed or…?
Esmeralda: You always use whitey names.
Mr. Marin: What names?
Esmeralda: Honky names.
Mr. Marin: What’s a honky?
Esmeralda: Honkies, Frenchies, frogs.
Mr. Marin: You’re not French?
Esmeralda: No, I’m not French.
Mr. Marin: I didn’t know.
Esmeralda: I am, but not proud of it.
Mr. Marin: Fine, I’m not either.
Esmeralda: Wiped him out!
Khoumba: Why use these names?
Mr. Marin: Khoumba, if I start choosing names to suit all your origins, it’ll never end.
Esmeralda: Just change a little.
The theme of identity is complicated when immigrant status is mixed with class status. Even more students speak out against what they say is a bourgeois way of speaking:
Mr. Marin: Before mastering something, the imperfect subjunctive, you’re telling me it’s no use. Start by mastering it, then you can call its use into question.
Image 16. Sound fills the empty classroom, in Entre les Murs
The students protest that “normal” people do not speak like that. This is a key rhetorical question in the film: what constitutes “normal”? And it cuts both ways. While the teacher tries to educate his students, the teenagers end up teaching him a great deal as well. When Mr. Marin demands that Souleymane share his “concern” with the class, Souleymane says that there are rumors that Mr. Marin likes men. He prefaces this statement thus: “If I tell you, I am good for Guantanamo. I’ll be tased.” This insinuation is a way to undermine to power of the teacher in the classroom by placing him in a marginalized social category. At the end of the film, we see the empty classroom filled with upturned chairs and the sounds of the children playing in the courtyard downstairs. The film ends on this somber tone. It is an echo of the first scene in which maids were cleaning the desks. The seemingly neutral space has been exposed to life and conveys now a strong sense of melancholy.
Image 17. The roof is a space of power, allowing privacy and counter-surveillance, in La Haine
In the climactic moments of these films, characters break free from the order imposed upon them to discover spaces of power within the produced space of control, or to modify and reclaim existing spaces as their own. One way in which this is done is simply by moving around in the space in a highly personal style. There is a sequence in La Haine where the three protagonists walk through the dull spaces of the cité but the camera moves with them, turns as they turn and speeds up or slows down with their movements and the rhythms of their speech. In this sequence, the bland courtyards and open passageways become more interesting. Michel de Certeau has described the act of walking as a means for the “local authority” to assert some control over a designed environment:
The chorus of idle footsteps…they are myriad…they cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character…their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities…they weave places together.[19]
Image 18. Graffiti as a means to reclaim space, in La Haine
Another way to reclaim spaces of vulnerability it to inflict damage on them or to modify them with personal signification in the form of graffiti. De Certeau describes how the act of modifying a space is a means for the local authority to make it habitable:
It ‘authorizes’ the production of an area of free play (Spielraum) on a checkerboard that analyzes and classifies identities. It makes places habitable. On these grounds, I call such discourse a “local authority.” It is a crack in the system that saturates places with signification” [20]
A key area of “free play” on an otherwise classifying “checkerboard” is the roof as a public space. The roof is a space of power because it allows complete privacy and a full view of the space surrounding it. It represents freedom. That is why regulations prohibit the residents of the HLM from entering the roof space. The mayor arrives with a number of police officers and forces everyone to leave the roof.
Image 19. At a faculty meeting, administrators decide how to better discipline students, in Entre les Murs
In Entre les Murs, the two class representatives are allowed to sit in on the teachers’ meeting. This is a private room where teachers discuss the students’ work and behavior and plan new initiatives. It is a space of power and the two girls have access to it. Esmeralda sports a t-shirt with bold letters proclaiming “TUNISIE.” It is her way to asserting power in this space. Esmeralda’s shirt rearticulates the wounds of colonial history, and its presence in the staff room invades the existing social order. It is a defiant statement that the former colony is here to stay and must be recognized as part of the system. Both girls laugh and joke during the meeting and, by doing so, use their place of power to undermine the greater power structure.
In contrast to this reclamation of social space, Carl, who has been moved to this school after discipline problems at another school, seems to have resigned himself to the role of subdued subject. “J’aime ma cité,” he says mechanically when he reads his essay. Interestingly, he has also internalized this new kind of French identity, the identity of a French subject or colony.
Boubacar: What is your National team?
Carl: France.
Boubacar: Why do you say you’re Caribbean rather than French?
Carl: We’re French. It’s a French region.
Boubacar: Why don’t you ever say you’re French?
Carl: It’s the same.
Boubacar: I don’t think so.
He has been moved around so many times that he has resigned himself to following the rules of the system without inviting trouble. His breaking point occurs at the end of the film when he lashes out at Mr. Marin: “You think you’ve tamed me?”
Wei, too, finds it unable to express himself because of language barriers, and the challenge of settling in is physically manifested in his allergies. Other students, however, employ different means to reclaim their identity and create social spaces of their own. Because the architecture is so neutral, clothes take on an added significance for these students. They assert their identity through their “looks.” Arthur goes up in front of the class and defends his look as part of his self-portrait essay:
Clothes are an expression of freedom. I’ll dress how I want and you dress how you want, okay. I dress like this to be different and not follow the others like sheep…. I also think that if there were 22 Goths here and one guy like you you’d keep quiet then.
Image 20. Souleymane’s hearing and expulsion, in Entre les Murs
More than once, the external world enters the school in the form of parents. The teachers are concerned because Wei’s mother, who was living in France illegally, is being deported. Another heartbreaking moment in the film occurs when Souleymane’s mother is summoned to a hearing in front of the disciplinary committee. She delivers a solemn and dignified soliloquy of apology in a language that no one but Souleymane understands. He translates for her: “She apologizes on my behalf.” But immediately after this, votes are cast in a glass box, and Souleymane is expelled. It seems Khoumba was right when she said “it’s all the same... it's all settled.” Only at the very end do the teachers embrace this state of dystopia. For the first time, they enter the courtyard and play soccer with the students. Before this the courtyard had been viewed from above only. Now the camera enters the courtyard and destroys the hierarchy of spatial order.
Image 21. Mr. Marin and the camera enter the courtyard, undermining the power structure, in Entre les Murs
Image 22. The architecture and social hierarchy both collapse, in Playtime
Image 23. Monsieur Hulot gets mistaken for the architect, in Playtime
In Playtime, a strained utopia degenerates into dystopia in the second half of the film. Roles are reversed when Monsieur Hulot gets mistaken for the architect of a modern restaurant that begins falling apart. The film that began with perfect order ends with a perfect chaos: scenes of drunken merrymaking. The waiter who had been waiting outside for much of the night is now allowed back in. He had been forced to remain outdoors because his shirt had ripped. As the night progressed, other waiters who had lost a button or a shoe would go out and borrow that item from the excluded waiter. The waiter in the back alley is a metaphor for the Paris banlieue; he is excluded from view and exploited. He watches the party from the outside. Paris needs him but does not want to affiliate with him.
Image 24. The excluded waiter watched the party from outside, in Playtime
Conclusion
As the films illustrate, spaces of power and spaces of vulnerability have the potential to inform new initiatives for urban planning and social housing architecture in the Paris banlieue. Instead of attempting to subvert the heterogeneity of a diverse society, architecture must facilitate social relations by creating more spaces of self-empowerment.
In February 2008, Amira Osman and Amanda Gibberd, university researchers in housing and urban environments, delivered a lecture at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and used the term “architectural apartheid” to describe a “disabling” environment that results from a specific “design philosophy” that aims to mitigate a deficiency.[21] Even though they were advocating on behalf of the disabled rights movement and for the rethinking of accessible housing, their concept is portable to an understanding of the conflict in the Paris banlieue. Osman and Gibberd describe two possible ways to address housing for the disabled: the first is the “historical medical model” which focuses on the “nature of the impairment…[and which reduces people’s] capacity and confidence to interact on an equal level with other people in society,” and the second is the “social model… based on the belief that the circumstances of people with disabilities and the discrimination they face are socially created phenomena and have little to do with the impairments of disabled people.”[22] Osman and Gibberd believe that the “‘cure’ to the ‘problem’… [of xenophobia] lies in restructuring society” rather than the restructuring of individuals around a fixed concept of society.[23] This restructuring of society can only arise through a restructuring of the way in which space is occupied. Rather than employing design to “fix” society, architects must use design to facilitate positive social interactions. Architects can play a role in the creation of what Osman and Gibberd call “non-segregating” or “enabling” physical and social environments.[24]
It is interesting to study architecture’s response to social unrest through the lens of the two possible responses described by Osman and Gibberd. In his 2007 article for the Architectural Record, Sam Lubell describes the measures taken by the French authorities after the 2005 civil unrest. While 80% of the housing in many banlieues is public, no neighborhood in the city of Paris is composed of more than 25% public housing.[25] Post-2005 measures taken by the government to address the discontent of the working class have taken two forms: the first is a massive increase in the construction of public housing in the greater Paris region, and the second is the insistence that all quarters of the city of Paris must from now on strive to contain at least 20% public housing. These attempts are inadequate because they aim at marginally slowing the exodus of the poor from the city without changing the living conditions in the banlieue. The few successes that Lubell cites comprise young and innovative architects working on creative housing projects within the boundaries of Paris “to stave off a sense of alienation and resentment” among the low income working class.[26] However, these designers overlook almost completely the symbolic characteristics of lived space, which cannot be addressed through formal interventions alone.
What is missing from these initiatives is the courage to recognize the plagued banlieue and its architecture as an integral part of the rapidly expanding metropolis. Wassenaar laments the inability of the French government to detach itself from architectures of the past, calling it the “political establishment’s denial of the importance of architecture.”[27] He opposes most of the state’s stranglehold on all architectural ventures. This, he explains, reduces Modernism to a mechanized production of uniform housing for the poor, and reserves “historic styles” for monuments or homes for the rich, deepening the symbolic divide between architectural forms.[28] This social division is also maintained by a strict boundary between Paris proper and its banlieue, where the entire visual landscape is vastly different. Wassenaar proposes a solution in which the city takes over its periphery:
If Paris is to grow and renew itself as an important metro-polis, that can only be done by unifying the historic heart with the poor areas around it, which are now separated from the center by fortifications in the form of the Périférique Ring Road, and thus creating one Greater Paris.[29]
Wassenaar’s observation illustrates that the challenge is larger than the scope of architecture and must be addressed at the urban scale as well. The resistance to change and to an acceptance of more fluid boundaries in the Paris metropolis is symptomatic of an inability to reconcile the traditional with the contemporary in architecture.
Robert Venturi writes about the importance of tradition in the preface of his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: “it cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.”[30] He explains that a grasp of tradition “involves, in the first place, a historical sense… which is a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together.”[31] This grasp is what makes the writer/architect “most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own comtemporaneity.”[32] While he critiques the sweeping claims made by the formulators of the International Style movement, his insistence on an all-encompassing awareness of the contemporary spirit of the age (which for him includes historical and traditional contexts) is a Modern idea: Colin Rowe, for example has traced the influence of classical proportions in Le Corbusier’s work by comparing the Villa Savoye – a Modern house – to Palladio’s classical Villa Rotunda.[33] Venturi’s opposition to a mechanical copying of architectural forms – whether classic or Modern – is therefore much in tune with what architects including Le Corbusier would have said.
In Learning from Las Vegas, however, Venturi goes on to explore the realm of the symbolic in architecture. He explains the significance of architecture as symbol and questions the idea that the creation of form is merely a “logical process, determined solely by program and structure, with an occasional assist… from intuition.”[34] Likewise, it is impossible to divorce the architectural form of the banlieue housing projects from the symbolism that has become associated with it. In order to enable new symbolic associations to this architecture, and to create a feeling of belonging and involvement in its inhabitants, architects need to give agency and autonomy to Certeau’s “local authorities.” They need to introduce ambiguity in order to allow for a multiplicity of interpretations. They need to design more social spaces of power and minimize the rigidity inherent in spaces of vulnerability. Grasping this intangible but clearly identifiable quality in the design of new housing projects is crucial for architects who aiming to introduce effective housing reforms.
[1] Michel de Certeau. The practice of everyday life, Volume 1 (University of California Press, 1988), 106.
[2] Steven Wassenaar, “The Power to Annihilate: State and Architecture in France,” Volume 5 (2005), 13.
[3] Wassenaar, 13.
[4] Stjepan G. Meštrović and Helene M. Brown, “Durkheim's Concept of Anomie as Dereglement,” Social Problems 33.2 (1985), 81.
[5] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 70.
[6] Lefebvre, 87.
[7] de Certeau, 96.
[8] de Certeau, 93.
[9] Pieter Uittenhove, “Brief uit Parijs = Letter from Paris,” Archis 5 (1997), 51.
[10] Playtime, DVD. Directed by Jacques Tati. Paris, France: Bernard Maurice and René Silvera, 1967. English from subtitles.
[11] La Haine, DVD. Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. Paris, France: Canal+, 1995. English from subtitles.
[12] Entre Les Murs, DVD. Directed by Laurent Cantet. Paris, France: Sony Pictures Classics, 2008. English from subtitles.
[13] de Certeau, 106.
[14] Lefebvre, 75.
[15] Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (Vintage, 1995), 204.
[16] Foucault, 204.
[17] Lefebvre, 74.
[18] Lefebvre, 73.
[19] de Certeau, 97.
[20] de Certeau, 106.
[21] Amira Osman and Amanda Gibberd, “Housing for Special Needs: Physical Interior Design to Accommodate Special Needs,” Paper delivered at University of Pretoria, South Africa (2008), https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/handle/2263/4381, accessed January 1st 2010, 3.
[22] Osman, 3.
[23] Osman, 3.
[24] Osman, 3.
[25] Sam Lubell, “In Wake of Paris Riots, Public Housing Authority Builds More, and Better Projects to Stem Dissaffection,” Architectural Record 195.1 (2007), 26.
[26] Lubell, 28.
[27] Wassenaar, 12.
[28] Wassenaar, 13.
[29] Wassenaar, 13.
[30] Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 13.
[31] Venturi, 13.
[32] Venturi, 13.
[33] Colin Rowe, "The mathematics of the ideal villa", The mathematics of the ideal villa and other essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 13.
[34] Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 7.
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