"Searching for the Grand Paris" "How was Paris rebuilt after the Second World War?" -After the Second World War, Paris had not experienced a lot of destruction in the city center. There was more destruction in the suburbs. For example, Boulogne-Billancourt and Noisy-le-Sec, but for Paris, very few bombs fell directly on the city center. The reconstruction in what we will call the Parisian region, not just the city center, was the same as in the rest of the country. So, there were a certain number of urban-planning choices, not architectural, but planning, that had to be applied throughout France. This meant, on the one hand, organizing the land in a more regular way, because it was from the Middle Ages, the classical period, so it needed to be standardized, arranged into larger sections, they needed to implement plans for the roads, widen the roads, and most importantly in the Parisian region, try to separate residential areas and industrial areas. This meant that if a factory had been destroyed, for example, in Porte de la Chapelle, which suffered heavy bombing, or the Renault factory. The idea was that they did not want to rebuild the workplaces in the same districts as the residential areas. So, the industrialists were obliged to find locations on the outskirts of the residential areas to avoid this mixture of urban functions. This took place in Paris and in the Parisian region, in the affected parts of the suburbs. That is the urban planning side of things. In terms of architecture, there was no fixed rule. There were architects who followed the modern movement in architecture and designed buildings like, for example, those in Noisy-le-Sec's train station district, where there are tower blocks with flat roofs, made from concrete, and in the center of Paris, because there were a few areas where bombs had been dropped, the idea was to accompany what was already there, so the architectural structures from the 20th century, and to use materials that corresponded with the feel of the area. Things like stone and slate for roofs. In the city center, the areas that had suffered war damage were reconstructed relatively quickly. It took less than a year to clear the rubble, to complete the clearing. There hadn't been many mine-clearing operations. This took place in other towns, like, for example, Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, which is slightly further out. But overall, we can say that after 10 years, the rebuilding in these areas was achieved. And from the 1970s onwards, more questions were raised, no longer about construction, but about urban planning, because the region was undergoing an important demographic development and so, the question was where to put the new housing, how to adapt towns to accommodate the increasing number of cars. This was considered in the original construction plans, but these were then expanded. This is another issue. It is no longer rebuilding. It is urban planning, the development of towns. The state, between 1945, '46, '47, and 1977, which is 30 years, corresponding to the Trente Glorieuses, in a similar chronological fashion, there was a lot of state intervention in two distinct ways. The main intervention concerned social housing with a lot of support for social housing organizations, such as public social housing with the HLM offices, in Paris, in the Seine regions, in almost all the main districts of the suburbs. They encouraged, partly through financial methods, this construction of social housing. And they also encouraged, particularly in 1953, with a series of laws, called the Plan Courant, that encourages property developers to build by giving them the ability to acquire land, through quite complex negotiations, and by helping these large development projects with facilities, such as shops and transport. It must be said, if we look back at these large state interventions, with reference to housing, the amount of housing was enough. There was a huge construction effort, which was effective, in that it led to a reduction of the region's shanty towns. So, on a quantitative level, the results may be positive. The urban planning aspect was a lot less positive. Transport did not follow. Employment did not follow. There was a lack of job vacancies. The creation of businesses and factories came later, but it was a delayed reaction. This created commuter towns, housing estates that were not well connected to the rest of the area or to the capital city, and so, it was a mixed result. "How did social housing develop in the Parisian region?" The first social housing appeared in the Parisian region originally in the suburbs, at the very end of the 19th century, just after the Siegfried law in 1894. In Stains, for example, and in the north-eastern suburbs. These projects were well known, they were given a lot of media coverage, there were news reports, announcements, little pamphlets were handed out. But in terms of quantity, it wasn't actually that much. The turning point for development... This was because the start of the social housing movement was halted by the First World War. We were not building between 1914 and 1918, even though there were plans. For example, in Bagnolet, in Les Lilas, places like that. The big development before 1945 was in the 1920s, so after the first rebuilding took place, until the crisis of 1929, '30, '31, '32, as far as France was concerned, with what we all know when we walk around Paris, and up to the outskirts of Paris. I'm talking about the HBMs, the affordable social housing around the Boulevards of the Marshals. The reason is that, on the one hand, the public housing offices for the Seine and Paris, which were founded in 1914 or 1915, but they hardly did anything during the war, except from preparing for the future, benefited from the destruction of the fortifications in 1920. The land was relatively inexpensive and so, the affordable social housing area, the area between Paris and the neighboring suburbs, came into existence, on the site of the old fortifications. After the war, from the 1950s onwards, the social housing offices built a lot of property. So, that is social housing. In terms of private property, with this encouragement I was talking about for private development, as soon as an area became available, through one way or another, through expropriation, or through a sale, pre-emptive rights of the town, or a private sale, construction took place because the region was developing, and attracting more of a workforce and more residents, and so, there was a need for housing, and housing was built everywhere. It was built everywhere, but it was not all the same. With the construction of private housing, if you look at the map of arrondissements, the so-called rich arrondissements, which are the western arrondissements, saw the construction of higher quality buildings, or building complexes, which were relatively expensive, whether for sale or rental. That does not mean that private developments were not built in East or North East, but these were often less costly and less luxurious, so for example, they might have had a smaller garden.
