Assembly of Film

“It cannot be overlooked that the assembly line, which plays a fundamental role in the process of production, is in a sense represented by the filmstrip in the process of consumption. Both came into being at roughly the same time. The social significance of the one cannot be fully understood without that of the other”

Walter Benjamin

Landsdowne Live and the Urban Growth Machine

When Robert Dahl wrote his book on urban governance in 1961 he asked the question of who governs the city, and how urban development can be understood in a political context. This early contribution to the study of urban governance is complemented by Logan and Molotch’s classic 1987 essay “The City as a Growth Machine.” Logan and Molotch maintain that the question of “Who Governs” has to be complemented by the equally central question “For What.”

Land-based interest and the day-to-day actions of urban elites figures prominently in their thesis, and their analysis provides an agency-centered understanding of the power relations and resources underpinning the formation and development of urban places and systems. Logan and Molotch argue that “for those who count the city is a growth machine, one that can increase aggregate rents and trap related wealth for those in the right position to benefit.” The desire to drive growth creates a consensus among elite groups, a consensus which is used to eliminate alternative visions of the role of local government. The Urban Growth Machine (UGM) thesis, which stems from this essay, maintains that coalitions of land-based elites drive urban politics to expand the local economy and the accumulation of wealth. Civic boosters them, connect the very essence of civic pride to growth.

According to this analysis the rentier-class ensures support for the project of continued growth by creating community solidarity on the collective benefit of growth and expansion. Among this growth coalition, local business people, especially those who invest and finance property development and real estate are major participants in urban politics, and are often deploy their considerable resources to promote growth based development. Much of the growth mobilization involves local government (which rentiers need local governments to succeed). The aforementioned properties interest playing a major role in electing local politicians: paying tribute to the old political adage that politics is about who gets what, here and how. And so when a development friendly Mayor such as Larry O’Brien is elected, they can act in full force to bring the UGM up to maximum speed: which is perhaps most evident in the Landsdowne Live project currently being proposed for Ottawa.

Property developers and financiers, however, are not alone in driving the UGM. Local media the authors point out also benefit from expansion since they gain increased circulation, advertising and profit as a result of growth. Historically, newspapers “bolster and maintain the predisposition for general growth.” Second, baseball and football stadia have been used by local governments to provide a focus for development projects.

Landsdowne live is a wonderful example of how the interests of media and property development mesh with the UGM. Media outlets such as Team 1200, Ottawa Sun, and media personalities such Glen Kulka, have trumpeted the benefits of a new stadium, and their voices should not be seen one voice among many, but a voice with vested interest in promoting not only general growth but the expansion of sports in the city from a purely profit laden perspective. Cleverly, these media outlets have outright ridiculed politicians and civic activists who propose alternative visions, as the UGM contends. Likewise for the property developers: local property robber baron Greenberg has used the Citizen to promote the growth-centered vision for the city. All those who oppose this grand vision were are told, have no civic pride. It is not a stretch to say this is an unfair playing field, is it is a question of power and resources. However, as this is an agent centered understanding of the political economy of development, the thesis also argues that interest which do not mesh with this view can be quite effective in offering an alternative vision if the growth based vision is not compatible with their “use of places – to live, to shop, and earn money.” Professionals not tied to the growth machine are most potent group to contend the growth coalition. The density of professionals in the Glebe offers just that possibility of effective citizen opposition.

The UGM is working quite well in Ottawa. With a sympathetic Mayor who is himself part of the urban growth coalition, civic resources have been mobilized to maintain their profitability and to promote one vision. I applaud those who are working to slow down the machine.

Slumology (The Reformers)

“It is clear that juvenile delinquency, crime and vice thrive in an environment of bad housing... many of these surveys have indicated that it is the slum that makes the slum dweller, not the slum dweller the slum, and therefore the elimination of the slum one tends to get the elimination of lower social standards”

Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, Submission to the Advisory Committee on Reconstruction (Curtis Report), 1944.

Urban Rewewal in Marseille's Old Port (1943)

In his book Vichy At War, Robert Paxton argues that despite claims to the contrary, technocrats ‘did not save the French people from suffering’ but rather shared Vichy’s ‘heavy burden of responsibility’. The Battle of Marseille, which finds some of its origins in Jacques Gréber’s regional plan of 1936, is perhaps one of the more glaring examples of how this burden is shared by French urban planners. Between 1931-36, Gréber developed a regional plan for the greater Marseille area that proposed a strict separation of functions, slum removal and a hierarchical transportation system. The architect and planner drew up strict aesthetic prescriptions (such as height limits) for Marseille’s Old Port to ensure the buildings of the working-class district would not impede the beauty of the rocky Mediterranean shoreline for those driving along his proposed seaside roadway. Segregated allotments and zoning rules based on class and income and the removal of ‘dangerous and unhealthy homes were also part of his plan to rationalize Marseille’s urban space’.

After numerous procedural delays, Eugène Beaudoin worked between 1941-1943 to update the regional plan. Inaugurated 1 February 1942, Beaudoin’s plan for Marseille can be seen as part of the same urban renewal program. Beaudoin recommended that the Old Port be ‘cleansed’ of its ‘leprous sectors’ and be replaced by an ‘airy, renovated quarter’ though which a new avenue would provide travelers with incomparable views of the coast. The Old Port, which according to a municipal publication was ‘decrepit, rotten…full of corruption, leprosy, and gangrene’, was blocking progress. Ideally the Old Port would be cleared of its ‘pus’ to open forth a path for the planned coastal road. However, like Gréber, Beaudoin was, on his own, unable to complete his slum clearance project.

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Despite these first unsuccessful attempt to level the Old Port, an ultimate collaboration between Vichy authorities and occupying forces would provide the pretext and administrative support needed to proceed with municipal plans. Starting on 22 January 1943, a forced expropriation led by zealous French authorities emptied the Old Port of its 30,000 residents. The police action would result in mass arrests, the deportation of 1,949 Jews to death camps, as well as near total demolition of the neighbourhood. While ordered by Berlin, the operation was as much about urban renewal as collaboration with Nazi policies. Two weeks earlier, on 8 January 1943, the local newspaper published a decree which revealed that City of Marseille had received authorization to borrow 500 millions francs to finance the construction of new buildings, to open up new roadways and ‘to cleanse unhealthy slums’. The expropriation was, as stated in a German newspaper, ‘a rare case where a measure of war coincides with projects long adopted by a Municipality and by a Government and already being executed.’ The Germans had emptied the Old Port of its working-class residents, Jews, leftists and displaced French-African soldiers, but equally as important, the action coincided admirably with Beaudoin’s urban renewal plan. The city profited from the police action by proceeding with expropriation without having to pay any indemnities. While Gréber is not directly responsible for the expropriation and deaths, an arc of knowledge stemming from Gréber’s original regional plan ultimately resulted in the destruction of Marseille’s Old Port.

La Défense 4: Un Aller-Retour

As a major employment node, the massive la Défense complex is directly connected to la Périphérique and to the RER commuter train network though a major transportation hub below the main plaza.


Auto-mobility@ la Défense


Rail Links


This last picture is almost seemingly the entrance to la Défense, however, it is in fact the entrance to Hull’s own peripheral government Place du Portage office complex built as an urban renewal project in the early 1970s. Like la Défense, the four-phase complex, boasting the largest contiguous floor of any office building in Canada, is linked to the (unfinished) highway and expressway network. The massive complexes and their unilinear transportation linkages are an ode to the swift character of the rush hour commute and to the efficient speed of modern office work and workers. While more accessible (in terms of class and age participation), these transportation corridors are still an enclosed and specialized one-way space. Its high-modernity entrenches the city landscape further in the limiting “yokes of corridor mentality”.

Place du Portage, like it’s transatlantic cousin, was built on the paths of low-income neighbourhoods - also-know-as ‘slums’ or ‘bidonvilles’ in the pathologies of modern postwar urban reformers. However, unlike la Défense, the old neighbourhoods still surround the government offices, though despite their kitch pastiche continue to suffer the repercussions of the massive intervention, and from a general uneven development of Hull-Gatineau’s urban-suburban polarization.

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.

Thanks Teppo!

A.K.A. Automatic, retired today after 20 NHL seasons. He always knew how to set the teppo (as a sign in the old wpg. arena used to say!).

La Défense 2

The triumphant modernist President Georges Pampidou pronounced in 1970 that “there is no modern architecture without towers.” La Défense his promised “forest of towers” is a testament to his undying faith in the promise of rapid modernization.



The CNIT, the iconic building of the first wave of building (pictured above) still stands, however, many of the first modernist buildings such as Gréber’s 1958 ESSO Tower, have been demolished and replaced by larger, higher ground rent producing, office buildings. Gréber’s square, mid-sized, early modernist frame has been replaced by the massive, and uncompelling Coeur de Défense Tower.



Pampidou was not the only President to show a preference for large scale projects. Successive Presidents would seek out further their own grands projets: for Gistard le Musée d’Orsay; for Mitterrand the Bastille Opéra (designed (as my Grade 10 French teacher pummeled into us during obsessing airing of TV5 “Club Sandwhich” episodes) by Canadian Carlos Ott). Not to be outdone by his predecessors, the work-harder-preaching Sarkozy renewed his commitment to a renewal program set into course in 2005-2006. Sarko reinforced his plan for an extensive expansion of La Défense, urging the state-owned site manager EPAD to fund and direct a massive building program on the site, in partnership with the region, the RATP, and the SNCF. La Défense would be Sarko's very own own imprint on the Parisian landscape.

La Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration

Opened in 2007, the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration has taken tentative steps at poking holes at the French republican ideal. It is also a welcome contrast with the Paris grands projets and major cultural destinations. The Museum’s narrative - which highlights immigrant experiences in France - distinguishes itself from other Parisian museums (revolution, revolution, liberté, fraternité, egalité!) by foregrounding the long history of immigration to modern France (Italy, Poland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, South America, Vietnam, and sub-Saharan Africa). This in itself is a disruption of the very notion of A French identity rooted in common ideals without difference. In various parts of the exhibit, the museum even attempts to question state regulation of immigration, and the impacts of demanding increasingly excessive levels of documentation and state control of the bodies of status and non-status immigrants.

Equally compelling is the side script detailing the postwar urban renewal projects and the expansion of high-rise apartment blocks on the Parisian periphery through comprehensive housing programmes, and the construction of the (in)famous HLMs. (The current temporary exhibit, by Patrick Zachmann, is a fascinating overview of his past 20 years of photography of the everyday life in the banlieue, which forces the viewer to questions popular representations of life in the French ‘burbs. Zachmann’s exhibit is also a wonderful juxtaposition of the stigmatizing code visual of life in the immigrant, working class suburbs, such as Champigny-sur-Marne, circa 1950, which led to the ambitious programme for constructing eight new towns)





The importance of the built environment, however, is not only contained within the Museum walls. La Cité is housed in a building that was part of the International Colonial Exposition of 1931. As the Museum’s audio-guide tells you, after the expo, the building, and especially the grand hall depicting French contributions to the world (travail, égalité, etc), was used to host various social and diplomatic events. However, disappointingly, the visitor is told very little beyond the architectural history of the building: the bizarre and brutal nature of the colonial exhibits (importing villages for display), colonial ideas of superiority represented in the murals in the main room, are not mentioned. In other words the messy, and ugly colonial underpinnings of the building, and the ideas represented in its frescos, architecture, and purpose, remains hors-texte. A (post) colonial défrichage is left to the viewer. Considering that many visitors are unequipped to decipher these complex meanings, more was needed here. Even some additional information on the nature of the colonial exhibits would point to the nasty nature of colonialism.



Perhaps this silence is less about the museum that about the state of politics. The absence of this critical view of the colonial period is reinforced by the fact that no major national politician was present at the opening of the Museum. Their ambivalence to some of the ideas and issues gingerly addressed in the Cité denotes an appalling unwillingness by the political elite to confront their colonial history. No great surprise, I guess, where, in face of ongoing questions about France’s colonial past, President Sarko recently argued that France “should be proud of its past and stop this nonsense about repentance.” Perhaps, hopefully, la Cité is a
small-work-in-progress-rock being thrown at the wall of chauvinist republicanism.

Link: La Cité: colloquims and articles

La Défense + Jacques Gréber

La Défense, the giant business center at the end of Paris’ grande axe stands as an iconic reflection of dream-image of postwar modernism. Initiated in the mid-1950’s by a state-controlled development agency, according to the 1933 Athens Charter, the master plan was designed for maximum density of office and residential use. The complex would be served by an extensive networks of roads meeting in a central roundabout laying beneath the main pedestrian esplanade. Thus direct access to the basements of the buildings would be assured.

Chantier de la Défense (Cnit)
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This modernist wonder has connections to Ottawa own ambitious postwar urban planning. The first skyscraper constructed, as the ESSO Standard Building designed by French architect and planner Jacques Gréber and his son Pierre. .

And, like Ottawa’s own tragic urban renewal projects, such as LeBreton Flats, la Défense required extensive expropriation. In this case over 8,000 ‘sub-standard” dwellings were demolished.

The Esso Standard was a spectacle of modernism, which fittingly, was featured in Jacques Tati’s Play Time – a marvelous satiric critique of the dislocation and empty busyness of modern life.

PLAY TIME Jacques Tati
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The scale of the project was immense, and the master plan would later be adapted, under the approval of uber-modernist Jacques Pompidou, to allow for bigger and more individual buildings. Now exclusively office space la Défense would total a mind-boggling 1,500,000 m2.