Contenu du sommaire : « Humaniser » la ville

In France, the Interwar period saw genuine interest in the United States, as shown by the publication of travel journals, novels and essays. These books and articles, sometimes published in large numbers, gave rise to lively debates in magazines and newspapers. Although the American city is an often-overlooked aspect, it still occupied a significant place in these writings. Some of these writings are tinted with a strong critical dimension or even clear anti-Americanism, viewing the American city as an inhuman and mechanised entity, whereas others emphasised the modernity the American metropolis and its trailblazing nature. However, the descriptions of the American city and its inhabitants hint at a view of a distinct American civilisation, opposed in almost every way to an already weakened European civilisation. The difference between the Old and New World gradually became a threat, which European civilisation would face if it could not defend its own values.

After the Second World War, a great deal of the traditional tenement houses in the centre of Glasgow was unfit for human habitation. Consequently, urban planning in Glasgow consisted mainly of eradicating slums. For more than twenty years, until the mid-1970s, Glasgow Corporation implemented a brutal overspill policy of the population to new towns and “vertical villages”, or “high rises”, which were built in haste in huge public-sector housing estates in the periphery of the city. At the time, the municipality claimed that it aimed at providing better housing conditions to the working-class population. This paper intends to contextualise these policies, to analyse the political and urbanistic intricacies of their making, and to show that they resulted in a major social, political and environmental failure.

This paper is based on the discovery and use of an unpublished collection of archives from the public and private sectors. Firstly, it sheds light on the conditions surrounding the creation of the very influential BERU (Bureau d'études et de réalisations urbaines, Urban Design and Development Office) in the late 1950s, including its powerful sponsors and their meaning, the trajectories (in terms of activism and careers) of its early recruits, and its founder Max Stern's use of his networks, including in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The paper then endeavours to decipher the intellectual and methodological influences at work within the BERU in its beginnings, at the crossroads of central planning and “human engineering”. Lastly, while the BERU's purpose was indeed to provide consulting, research and technical assistance in order to help resolve problems raised by the design and development of large-scale urbanism projects, its creators were first concerned about housing-related issues. The BERU's desire (notably shared by the young architects of Atelier de Montrouge, ATM) to give a subjective, more human dimension to architecture and urbanism would find expression in its earliest contracts to renovate city centres in the Lower Seine region, with the “heart of the city” being viewed as the favoured interface between the individual and the community.

Jacques Riboud, a petroleum engineer, became a property developer in the mid-1950s. He sought to offer an alternative to large housing estates by building small, private new towns, fully equipped and with a wide majority of detached houses in densely-built neighbourhoods. He designed the La Haie Bergerie neighbourhood as an initial “laboratory” to test his ideas, which he promoted through many books and articles. His industrial approach, which incorporated the full range of expertise areas into a single group (development, urbanism, architecture and construction), was distinct from the approach for large housing estates due to unique building and economic choices and attention paid to the inhabitants' desires. This example is still relevant today in a sustainable urbanism perspective.

In the medium term of urban history in the second half of the twentieth century, public authorities did indeed seek to humanise social housing estates insofar as these estates had, since their creation, appeared potentially dangerous for maintaining the social order. Moreover, this approach fit into the development of the contemporary city in the long term. This paper thus aims to describe the major stages that eventually led to a new public policy: the politique de la ville, i.e. “urban policy”.

Redon is known for its Carolingian cartularies; its abbey, region and socioeconomic context have been studied, but the town itself remains largely unexplored for the whole of the Middle Ages. And yet, Redon provides us with an example of a town growing next to an abbey where the relationship between the two has not yet been the object of extensive research. So far, it has been assumed that a second urban network was developed during the Early Middle Ages, before the transformations of the Central Middle Ages and around an initial settlement established over the antiquity period. Redon appears in 834. Research conducted on the period ranging from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries in Lotharingia and Languedoc has combined textual, archaeological and planimetric sources, therefore enabling the notions of abbey towns and monastic villages to be reviewed. I have used a similar approach for my work even if Redon, for lack of thorough wide-ranging research, remains a highly specific case in Brittany.

From its inception in the early seventeenth century, the “royal square” (place royale) quickly became a characteristic part of Ancien Régime town planning. By embellishing a town and glorifying the sovereign, the royal square is closely linked to the historical period of absolute monarchy. Although Paris has the largest number of royal squares, the model was also developed in many other French cities until the final years of the reign of Louis XVI. In 1786, plans for a royal square in Brest, drawn up by Parisian architect Claude Jean-Baptiste Jallier de Savault (1739-1806), were approved by the king in Council. However, these plans would never be carried out because of the political tensions that they caused. This immediate disavowal of the king's choice is an illustration of the deep local and provincial tensions in Brest and in Brittany in the late Ancien Régime.

This essay endeavours to distinguish the driving forces that organise the study of music in the city, a field that has been thoroughly renewed by historians and musicologists over the past thirty years. This paper picks out three major types of approaches: social history investigating the reciprocal relations between the city and the music that is made there, historical geography focusing on the spatial forms of musical practice, and lastly, an analysis of the soundscapes, with emphasis on the sensible dimension of places. It endeavours to establish a critical review of proposed approaches from English-speaking countries (urban musicology, soundscape studies), as well as French-language contributions, with particular emphasis on the issues raised by transdisciplinary approaches whose theoretical dimensions are seldom described in explicit terms.