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Matthew Taunton. Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass
Housing in London and Paris. Language, Discourse, Society Series.
New York Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 240 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-230-57976-7.
Reviewed by Alexia Yates (Center for History and Economics, Harvard
University)
Published on H-Urban (February, 2013)
Commissioned by Alexander Vari
Dwelling Poetically: Landscapes of Home in the Modern City
Many chroniclers and theorists of the modern metropolis have placed
the tensions between the fixed and the circulating, between mobile
capital and immobile built environments, at the heart of
urbanization.[1] Historical analysis of the urban experience,
pursuing the footprints of the "annihilation of space by time," has
tended to focus overwhelmingly on the spaces and implications of the
circulating--teeming crowds and heaving department stores, transient
newspapers and fleeting physiognomies, disposable fashion and
expendable spectacle. Matthew Taunton's _Fictions of the City
_instead approaches the material and discursive construction of
spaces of fixity in the modern metropolis, exploring the ways that
urban housing communicates (or fails to communicate) with the spaces
of circulation that define the city's political, economic, and social
life. Indeed, drawing on the work of literary scholars Franco Moretti
and Sharon Marcus, Taunton points to the interiorization of social
being and to the devaluation of the street as the definitive (if
politically ambiguous) accomplishment of the modern city. Thus the
importance of dwelling is such, he argues, that we must question the
dominance of the flâneur_ _as our lens on the subjective experience
of the urban.
_Fictions of the City _finds an alternative entry point to this
subjective experience in fictional works that address the phenomenon
of mass housing. A key function of fictional narrative in the
nineteenth century, the author argues, was to "attempt to make sense
of the complexity of modern urban life," a characteristic it shares
with more conventional texts on urban planning (p. 1). While the
contention that fiction provides a valuable window on historical
phenomena is hardly original, the focus on mass housing as a
particular urban artifact is rather more so, and Taunton guides the
reader expertly and elegantly from mid-nineteenth-century Paris to
turn-of-the-twenty-first century London (and even, thanks to H. G.
Wells, to turn-of-the-twenty-second-century urban England). In four
different chapters, we are introduced to a succession of works
treating four different types of mass housing, each reflecting and
reproducing particular geographies of class in different historical
moments: the Haussmannian _immeuble_ or apartment building, which
filled the building lots opened by the renovation of Paris in the
mid-nineteenth century; the suburban villa or cottage, which
characterized the market-driven suburban expansion of London in the
interwar period; the _grands ensembles _that provided housing for the
masses in the Parisian suburbs of the post-World War Two era; and the
council estates that mushroomed in and around London in the same
period.
Each chapter first addresses the political and economic environments
that helped shape the material form and geographic patterns of mass
housing in the particular instance under evaluation, before moving to
a discussion of fictional works that engage with and illuminate these
trends. The first chapter begins at the beginning, Paris of the
Second Empire (1852-70), birthplace of the flâneur. But before we
can don our hats and canes and wander off "botanizing on the
asphalt," Taunton suggests that we free ourselves from the boulevards
and instead direct our attention to the residential buildings that
line their sidewalks.[2] These buildings are presented as products of
both the state-led urban renovations of the mid-nineteenth century as
well as of longstanding patterns of urban growth and cultural
attitudes toward land ownership, all of which combined to promote a
well-developed middle-class rental market within the capital city's
administrative boundaries, and a rejection of small proprietorship
and working-class tenancy to the urban periphery. Following the
Haussmannian apartment building through selective narrative
representations that span more than a century (from Emile Zola's 1877
novel _L'Assommoir _to Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's 1991 film
_Delicatessen_), Taunton focuses closely on conflicting visions of
its capacity for sustaining forms of collective life. He rejects
Walter Benjamin's suggestion that the interior functioned as a
hermetically sealed space, instead ferreting out moments in writing
and film that reassert the capacity for a malleable experience and
adaptation of the _immeuble_, one that connects residents to each
other as well as to the urban and global context.
The argument about the centralizing nature of Parisian urbanism and
the particular class geography of that city--about which more will be
said below--stands in contrast to the politics and practices explored
in the case of London. The second chapter moves to the pre-World War
One and interwar British capital, where, in contrast to the Parisian
apartment building, the typical urban house is the suburban villa or
cottage, detached or semidetached and stretching for miles along
well-developed transport networks. If Paris kept its bourgeoisie in
the tight embrace of its tax walls and fortifications, the London
suburbs became an aspirational space for the middle classes, drawn by
a longstanding attachment to property ownership, abundant
entrepreneurial development, and a political and aesthetic
romanticism that lodged freedom and emotional fulfillment in the
countryside rather than the city. Taunton gives a skillful and
illuminating overview of both the material and discursive landscape
of the suburbs, placing the works of Wells and George Orwell in
dialogue with the changing urban form and the works of contemporary
urbanists. More than simply highlighting divergent perspectives on
the social and political import of urban density, the particular
concern (and most interesting contribution) of this chapter is to
demonstrate the role that housing patterns and suburbanization play
in class formation. Orwell's _Coming Up for Air _(1939) and C. F. G.
Masterman's _The Condition of England _(1909) are combined to suggest
the ways that the democratization of home ownership contributed to
the expansion, rather than the predicted dwindling, of Karl Marx's
petit bourgeoisie.
This exploration of the politics of place is continued in the book's
third chapter, where England's conservative, property-owning,
market-driven suburbs are contrasted with France's radical,
tenant-occupied, state-developed urban peripheries. Returning to
Paris, the book explores the visions of urban life at work in the
construction of the large-scale public housing projects (the _grands
ensembles_)_ _and the _villes nouvelles_, or new towns, which
constituted official response to the housing crisis following the
Second World War. The severity of the housing problem, combined with
several decades of modernist thought on urban development and
dwelling, produced a "completely unprecedented form of housing" whose
scale and social world fascinated residents, novelists, and
filmmakers (p. 107). The author provides a thoughtful discussion of
the ways that _grands ensembles _and _villes nouvelles _intended to
replicate and extend the urban experience. Lacking physical
integration with the central city, however, they failed to expand the
sites and means of political empowerment that are necessary to civic
life. While Taunton explicitly rejects the simple architectural
determinism that so often characterizes work on the _banlieues_, his
selection and interpretation of fictional accounts of life in these
agglomerations nevertheless focus on experiences of alienation and
isolation that unwind (seemingly inevitably) to the violence and
despair of Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film _La Haine_, an analysis of
which closes the chapter. The author misses an opportunity to take
seriously the sincere optimism that marked both the design and
experiences of the _grands ensembles _and their initial residents;
many of the quotations that Taunton provides from his exploration of
Christiane Rochefort's 1961 novel _Les Petits enfants du siècle
_remain open to a more complex and positive interpretation that would
better capture the multifaceted nature of contemporary experience.
The book's final chapter returns to London, where a post-World War
Two housing crisis also led to state intervention in the provision of
housing. In contrast to the French experience, Taunton contends, in
which a nation dispirited and divided by wartime occupation embraced
a paternalistic housing policy marked by socio-spatial segregation, a
united and victorious Britain took up social housing on a mixed-class
model as a central duty of the state for its citizens. Focusing
particularly on the contrasting experiences of British social housing
depicted in Ken Loach's semidocumentary _Cathy Come Home _(1966) and
Gary Oldman's film _Nil by Mouth_ (1997), Taunton traces the impact
of housing policy on class politics and identity. The worthy
working-class life skewered on the systematic failings of the welfare
state chronicled by Loach gives way to the brutal existence of
Oldman's permanent underclass of estate dwellers, stigmatized by the
architectural brutalism and Margaret Thatcher-era privatization that
indelibly polarize renters and owners in neoliberal Britain. Yet
these estates enjoy better physical connections to the city than
their French counterparts. This ambiguity between connection and
isolation is demonstrated by Taunton's contrast of _Nil by Mouth _to
Michael Winterbottom's 1999 film _Wonderland_, which foregrounds the
potential for connection between estate housing complexes and the
collective life of the city.
Much of this work covers familiar ground, both in its interpretive
thrust and the works chosen for discussion, but it does so in a
highly readable manner, combining sites and methods of analysis that
are not typically joined in urban studies. The conceptual move from
masses on the street to masses in housing is a welcome and enriching
one, and particularly relevant, as the author notes, to our current
urban environments. (Whether in suburban communities lacking
sidewalks or slum agglomerations defined by precarious housing, the
political economy of dwelling is central to contemporary urban
policy.) In its effort to provide a balanced synthesis and coherent
comparative narrative, however, the work relies on some
oversimplifications that detract from its persuasiveness. It is
embedded in conventional distinctions between a state-centered France
and an entrepreneurial England, extended here even to conceptions of
property rights, which simply does not withstand scrutiny. The
discussion of the "banishment" of the French urban poor to the
periphery perpetuates outdated understandings of Haussmannization and
Parisian urban growth more generally, understandings that depend on a
perception of the Paris periphery as a wasteland, a view long-since
challenged in both English and French literature.[3] While the
literary and filmic works under review will be well known to many
readers, the author could have provided more and consistent
information about them with regard to general plot outlines and, in
some cases, even dates of publication or release. This would have
particularly increased the book's utility for undergraduate
audiences, for which it is in fact very well suited, especially as an
example of a lucid and exceptionally jargon-free contribution to
literary studies.
Notes
[1]. Notably, David Harvey, _The Limits to Capital _(Oxford:
Blackwell, 1982); David Harvey, _The Urban Experience _(Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989); and Henri Lefebvre, _Urban Revolution_, trans.
Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
[2]. Walter Benjamin, _Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of
High Capitalism _(London: Verso Books, 1983), 36.
[3]. Nicholas Green, _Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois
Culture in Nineteenth-Century France _(Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1990); Roger V. Gould, _Insurgent Identities:
Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune_
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Alain Faure, ed., _Les
Premiers banlieusards: Aux origines des banlieues de Paris
(1860-1940)_ (Paris: Créaphis, 1991); Annie Fourcaut, _La Banlieue
en morceaux: La crise des lotissements défectueux en France dans
l'entre-deux-guerres_ (Grâne: Créaphis, 2000); and Sabine Barles,
"Une approche métabolique de la ville, Paris XIXe-XXe siècles," in
_Paris, alchimies d'une métropole_, ed. Thierry Baudouin, François
Laisney, and Annie Térade (Paris : Editions Recherches, 2008),
251-268.
Citation: Alexia Yates. Review of Taunton, Matthew, _Fictions of the
City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris_. H-Urban,
H-Net Reviews. February, 2013.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=36422
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
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