The Spirit of 1958 (la Défense 3)

In a recent forum on la Défense, Charles de Gaulle’s 1958 decision to initiate this grand projet was characterized as a prophetic vision. The beholders of his fateful plan, the hommes sages reunited to pontificate on its future, presented a vision for the next half century. The event also provided the current hyper-président Sarkozy with a new laurel. During the June 30th meeting, the mediator of la table ronde lauded Sarko’s plan for réaménagement as a saving grace for the sector. Sarko, accepted the praise, and as if to mimic his Gaullist predecessor, he made an equally bold call: for La Défense to become une grande place financière; even a rival to the London’s City. This new prophecy aims to renew the spirit of 1958, to bring back the daring urban renewal spirit of the post-war period. President Sarkozy challenged his colleagues to rise to the height of the proceeding generation. Sarko reminds us that la Défense was once a bidonville and an architectural scar (he knows because he used to cross the area on his way to soccer matches). This slum, he pontificates, was transformed as a result of de Gaulle’s hubris: on nothing (rien) [empty?] was created a visionary urban renewal project. The vision of greatness must be celebrated, Sarko urged, and echoing his comments about colonialism, he dismissed regret over dispossession as a misplaced idea, and called on this generation to replicate the great spirit of 1958.



The narrative was as follows: the land was underused, and worst of covered with (invisible) morally unfit subjects, in short, it was “empty” and ripe for redevelopment. The script of dispossession and displacement is as N. Blomley points out an active and ongoing process. Dispossession, in this case of the former low-income residents (rather than indigenous groups N.B. refers to), requires the continued display of “spatial technologies of power” such as surveying, planning, map making, place naming. In both the initial expropriation, and the ongoing embourgeoisement, the acquisition and maintenance of proper property use and ownership is a guiding principle reinforced by the planning authority of the state-authority EPAD (Etablissement pour l'Aménagement de la Région de la Défense). This is entirely consistent with the longer trajectory of liberalism which holds property at the centre of its regulatory regime. However, property is not solely a material question of land use, property markets, or ground rent. Land and property, as Blomley argues, is also about identity. Specifically to the case of nationalism: “the formation of national identity is, in part, a mediation of the meanings and significance of land as property” (Blomley, 2004: 38). National narratives of ownership tell the story of how land should be ordered, and who should be excluded or included from ownership. The dream-image of a symbolic business center for Europe is a extension of these impulses and brings forward Sarko’s dream of creating un Grand Paris as the memory marker of his presidency – and is about national narratives.

During the round table, an effervescent Sarkozy noted that each generation is confronted with the choice to project itself onto the future, and that each has the option create a vision for the future. He trumpeted un désire “que l'audace redevienne une qualité française ! ». La Défense, he suggests to the audience, was an avant-garde project, a European and French first which created a high-rise, exclusive economic sector. The call is to renew this spirit: to create bigger, higher towers as a way to make cities greener, and the path towards France becoming a leader in the new Europe.

However, his call for a renewal of French audacity in urban development are truly nationalist, and by extension, anchored in the same authoritarian tendencies that have unfortunately plague too many state-induced or state-led large-scale urban redevelopment project. In proclaiming his love of architecture, the strict republican proclaims Versailles as an example of sound architecture, a good investment, and why critics of large-scale projects are wrong. These revisionist statements, while fittingly bizarre, and one of many of in a litany of krasher-like spray of sluggish rhetoric, render visible the authoritarian disposition of national urban renewal. The renewal of 1958 requires a forgotten, empty past as the only way forward where the (masked) ideological underpinnings of urban renewal were used to bypass democratic opposition. In their quest to promote these (failed) modernist dreams, national planners continue to displayed a rather shocking willingness to overlook the authoritarian tendencies of liberal modernist planning.