Renovation, energy saving, ecology… On the occasion of the international consultation “Neighborhoods of tomorrow” aimed at improving the living environment of the inhabitants of ten pilot territories, a look back at these projects designed as experimental laboratories.
Working-class neighborhoods are the epicenters of revolutions: urban revolutions, economic revolutions, social revolutions, but also political and cultural ones. Their stories tell the heritage of contemporary France: the heritage of migrations, the heritage of work, the heritage of experiences and social practices which have shaped the history of the industrial city and the advent of a collective “we” of worker essence.
The history of working-class neighborhoods is punctuated by trials: those of uprooting, urban promiscuity and the harsh conditions of existence and exploitation of the working class. Trials certainly, but also hopes and commitments, which have forged another image, less Manichean and disenchanted, of popular history. The relegation and segregation of neighborhoods is a historical fact which has nourished a whole derogatory imagination and an erroneous and yet well-rooted representation: the working-class neighborhoods would have seceded. For more than a century, the image of lost territories has taken root, plowed by religions and foreign powers who recruit their inhabitants as in the days of the “red suburbs” dominated, in the 1920s, according to their detractors, by a “foreign party”, the French Communist Party, subservient to the Soviet Union. These images continue to permeate our anxiety-provoking representations of working-class and peripheral neighborhoods. This “fear of the suburbs” was born with the advent of metropolises, and it still freezes our representations of reality today.
Centrality is not only polarized in Paris and in the mother towns of regional capitals, it is in reality also deployed in working-class neighborhoods, which have always been laboratories announcing social change, cultural creations and political innovations. These sensitive territories were entry points into the city where, confronted with otherness, their inhabitants learned citizenship and living together thanks to the school of the Republic, popular education, sociability tinged with municipal patriotism and public services (summer camps, health centers, social housing, etc.).
In these neighborhoods, the customs of festivals have certainly more than elsewhere created neighborhood ties and feelings of belonging to the same territory, to the same world. At the time of the golden age of the industrial city, socialization and political acculturation were based on a matrix which reconciled work and social and family life: we worked and lived in the same ecosystem, the city and its working-class neighborhoods. The shock of deindustrialization, which began in the 1960s, was brutal and caused the disintegration of a social model of integration and membership. Working-class centrality collapsed in the space of one or two generations, but working-class neighborhoods remained the future of cities, as the poet Jean Marcenac wrote in 1974: “A world written by human hands like a letter to the future.”
Director of the Center for Social History (University of Paris 1 and CNRS), Emmanuel Bellanger is also scientific advisor to the exhibition “Darling suburbs”, which will be held from April 9 to August 17, 2025, at the National Museum of the History of Immigration at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, in Paris, and the project to open the Amulop Museum (association for a museum of popular housing).
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