Making Space in Post-War France
The Dreams, Realities and Aftermath of State Planning

Edward Welch

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Research Monographs in French Studies 69

Legenda

14 February 2023  •  224pp

ISBN: 978-1-839541-81-0 (hardback)  •  RRP £95, $120, €120

ISBN: 978-1-839541-82-7 (paperback, forthcoming)

ISBN: 978-1-839541-83-4 (JSTOR ebook)

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ContemporaryFrenchPoliticsHistory

The decades after World War II saw France’s look, feel and lived realities transformed by spatial planning and modernization. Aménagement du territoire was a technical and administrative project, but was also political, moral and philosophical, as well as creative and imaginative. It was driven by a powerful obsession with the future and a belief that spatial planning could create the future in the present. During the presidency of Charles de Gaulle (1958{-}69), it became a vehicle for reasserting France’s place in the world after decolonization and expressing its grandeur as an advanced civilization.

In Making Space in Post-war France, Edward Welch tracks the conceptual, ideological and discursive foundations of aménagement, mining an array of material from legislative texts to publicity brochures to investigate how visions of the future were articulated and inscribed on the ground as new towns, infrastructure and other expressions of modernity. He ranges across work by writers, filmmakers and photographers to explore how modernized landscapes and their effect on lived experience begin to permeate French culture during the 1970s and 80s, and how the legacies of spatial planning are negotiated politically, socially and culturally from the 1990s into the new millennium as the French state wrestles with the different pressures affecting its territory.

Edward Welch is Carnegie Professor of French at the University of Aberdeen.

Reviews:

  • ‘Welch provides deep insight into the origins and ethics of France’s planning culture... Making Space in Post-War France illuminates the contradictions of France’s post-war modernization through cogent syntheses and fine-grained analyses of a wide range of documents crucially, Welch lends to visual and verbal representations (Godard, Besson, Depardon, Chibane, Rolin...) not only diagnostic value, but a fresh critical edge.’ — Derek Schilling, L'Esprit Créateur 64.1, Spring 2024, 161
  • ‘One memorable chapter of the book recounts the ambitious creation of the ville nouvelle of Cergy-Pontoise outside of Paris in the 1970s. With evocative section titles such as ‘The Strange Temporality of New Towns’, Welch tells this story through a masterful, interdisciplinary combination of planning archives, television footage, propagandizing state-sponsored newsletters, and close readings of Annie Ernaux’s Journal du dehors and Éric Rohmer’s Métamorphoses du paysage. Copious illustrations are furnished as well, immersing us in the look and feel of this ‘future’ city of the 1970s.’ — Joshua Armstrong, Irish Journal of French Studies 23, 2023, 174-75
  • ‘Offering a distinctive contribution to existing work on post-war spatial modernism, this book deserves a well-earned place alongside other leading works of cultural and intellectual history that reveal France’s enduring fascination with space as a critical concept.’ — Jules O'Dwyer, French Studies 78.2, 2024, 360-61 (full text online)

For a contents listing, see this volume at JSTOR.

Bibliography entry:

Welch, Edward, Making Space in Post-War France: The Dreams, Realities and Aftermath of State Planning, Research Monographs in French Studies, 69 (Legenda, 2023)

First footnote reference: 35 Edward Welch, Making Space in Post-War France: The Dreams, Realities and Aftermath of State Planning, Research Monographs in French Studies, 69 (Legenda, 2023), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Welch, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Welch, Edward. 2023. Making Space in Post-War France: The Dreams, Realities and Aftermath of State Planning, Research Monographs in French Studies, 69 (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Welch 2023: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Welch 2023: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

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