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La Défense/Zone B: Light and Shadows of the French Welfare State Pierre Chabard

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La Défense/Zone B: Light and Shadows of the French Welfare State Pierre Chabard La Défense/Zone B: Light and Shadows of the French Welfare State Pierre Chabard To cite this version: Pierre Chabard. La Défense/Zone B: Light and Shadows of the French Welfare State. Footprint. Delft Architecture Theory Journal, Jap Sam Books, 2011. hal-02513216 HAL Id: hal-02513216 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02513216 Submitted on 23 Mar 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. 71 La Défense / Zone B (1953-91): Light and Shadows of the French Welfare State Pierre Chabard The business district of La Défense, with its luxu- The history of La Défense Zone B during the rious office buildings, is a typical example of the second half of the twentieth century gives a very French version of welfare state policy1: centralism, clear - and even caricatural - illustration not only of modernism, and confusion between public and the urban and architectural consequences of the private elites.2 This district was initially planned in French welfare state - both positive and negative 1958 by the Etablissement Public d’Aménagement - but also of its crisis, which emerged in the 1970s de la région de La Défense (EPAD), the first such and influenced the development of other types of planning organism controlled by the state. But this urban governance and planning. Therefore, Zone B district, called Zone A (130 ha), constitutes only a offers a relevant terrain for analysing relationships small part of the operational sector of the EPAD; between the political and architectural aspects of the other part, Zone B (620 ha), coincides with the this history since the end of World War II. Indeed, northern part of the city of Nanterre, capital of the this case study suggests a rather unexpected double Hauts-de-Seine district. Characterized for a long assumption: while French architecture of the 1950s time by agriculture and market gardening, this city and 1960s is generally considered by architectural underwent a strong process of industrialization history as pompous, authoritarian and subjected to at the turn of the twentieth century, welcoming a power, here it can appear incredibly free, inventive great number of workers and immigrants, a popula- and experimental. Conversely, architecture, known tion which today still constitutes the demographic as ‘urban’ starting in the late 1970s, was considered core of Nanterre. As a result, Nanterre is the site to be committed, democratic, even critical, and led of huge contrasts: a communist enclave for the to more stereotypical, sometimes rigid and aestheti- past seventy years in a district mainly dominated cally impoverished, forms. by the right wing (les Hauts-de-Seine); a municipal territory, but mainly under the sovereignty of the La Défense and the state as planner state and planned by the EPAD; an area marked The urban doctrines of the French welfare state, by poverty adjacent to the richest one in France; a which were structured and put in place during the forgotten ‘back office’ in the shadows of the crys- war and just into the postwar years, opened a new talline skyscrapers of La Défense; an urban chaos, chapter in the history of French planning, namely but geometrically anchored in the prolongation of the state’s take-over of the field of housing and the historical Grand Axe of Paris (beginning at the town planning after a period during which municipal Palais du Louvre and connecting the Place de la approaches balanced its centralizing tendencies. Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe and La Grande This phenomenon was emphasized by two key Arche de Spreckelsen). [fig. 1] moments. It began to gestate under the Vichy government and came to fruition in 1944 through 09 The European Welfare State Project: Ideals, Politics, Cities and Buildings, Autumn 2011, vol. 5/2, pp. 71-86 72 the creation of the Ministry of Reconstruction (1960), itself the outcome of studies conducted by and Urbanism (MRU) and its Board of Urbanism the SARP for the revision of the Paris Regional Plan (Direction Générale à l’Urbanisme, l’Habitat et la (Plan d’Aménagement de la Région Parisienne, Construction, DGUHC), which was changed in 1949 PARP). by Eugène Claudius-Petit to the Board of Planning (Direction à l’Aménagement du Territoire, DAT). The Ponts-et-Chaussées engineers, strongly represented in the Direction de la Construction of With the same logic, the Service d’Aménagement the same ministry, defended a more centralized and de la Région Parisienne (SARP), which as of 1941 technocratic practice of planning and a metropolis included the technical services of the Seine District, model as a system of urban centres, connected fell under the supervision of the MRU in 1944. André and strengthened by infrastructures. This model Prothin, head of the DGUHC and later the DAT until triumphed over the next Regional Plan of Paris 1958, and Pierre Gibel, head of the SARP, became (Schéma d’Aménagement et d’urbanisme de la key actors of state urbanism in general and the Région Parisienne, SDAURP) in 1965, driven by planning of the area of La Défense in particular. In Paul Delouvrier. In this respect, the operation of La response to the first state decision in 1946 to estab- Défense must be seen as a compromise, a hybrid lish a universal exhibition there, numerous studies product of the political and doctrinal evolution of were conducted and countless plans drawn up for state planning, aimed at decongesting the business the sector, until an initial master plan was adopted in district of central Paris without completely decen- October 1956, called ‘plan-directeur’. The creation tralizing it, while maintaining a direct relationship of the EPAD in 1958 was mainly the product of the with the centre of the capital city by means of the work undertaken during the previous decade under historical axis. the authority of Gibel and Prothin. The appointment of the latter as the first director of this public office In 1958, after decades of projects, plans and could be viewed as a sign of continuity. procrastination, the real beginning of the La Défense operation coincided precisely with a Nevertheless, Prothin’s forced departure from the change of regime: the advent of the Fifth Republic, DAT, over which he had reigned for fifteen years, which strengthened the executive power in general illustrated another step in the process at hand, and presidential power in particular, and defined which historian Isabelle Couzon described as being the institutional conditions of the French welfare ‘the eclipse of the MRU urbanists to the benefit of state. Even though it had been in gestation since the Ponts-et-Chaussées civil engineers, gradu- 1956,4 the EPAD was only created in late summer ally dominating the array of urban issues from the of 19585 with the aim of planning the future of the mid-1950s’.3 The nomination of Pierre Sudreau La Défense region - a broad operational area of 750 as Minister of Construction at the turn of the Fifth hectares that annexed some of the territory belong- Republic exemplified this renewal not only of the ing to three municipalities: Nanterre, Courbevoie elites but also of the doctrines. The head urban- and Puteaux. Reconfiguring the governance of this ists of the MRU, stemming for the greater part from area, the EPAD gave weight to the central state that the Seine district, aimed for decentralization and it previously did not have there. The board of the Malthusian control of urbanization (especially in EPAD, which first met on 2 March 1959, and where the case of the Paris metropolitan area). This ideol- the three municipalities accounted for only three out ogy was reflected in the general organization and of the sixteen votes, was clearly dominated by the development plan (PADOG) of the Paris region state, in particular its Ministry of Construction, led 73 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 1: Aerial view of the Zone B of La Défense in 1974, looking east (Archives EPAD). The ‘Grand Axe’ successively crosses the social housing estates built in the mid 1950s, the Zone A with the CNIT and the first skyscrapers of the busi- ness district and, in the background, the centre of Paris with the Eiffel Tower to the right. Fig. 2: EPAD, ‘Plan général des zones A & B & annexes’, 1 December 1963 (Archives EPAD). 74 by Pierre Sudreau between 1958 and 1962. The ness district of La Défense, planned in Zone A of first Zone A master plan was adopted in December the EPAD. 1964. [fig. 2] Evidently, the axis is ‘historical’, not because of its Grand Axe: space, time and symbols timelessness or because it conveys the illusion that The creation of the EPAD coincided with the advent it has always existed, but, on the contrary, because of the Fifth Republic in France and the return of of its historicity, because it reflects the singularity General De Gaulle as head of state. Nicknamed the of each of the eras it passed through, and mirrors ‘Président bâtisseur’6 by Pierre Sudreau, De Gaulle what each period of history had projected onto it: benefited from a period of exceptional economic simple ‘perspective’ for the King’s approval in the prosperity, the famous ‘Trente Glorieuses’ as coined seventeenth century, it became a ‘route royale’ in by Jean Fourastié.7 Faced with the pressing need the eighteenth century to give him easy access to to develop French cities and regional areas, De his hunting grounds at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
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