Emergency Landings. Large-Scale Housing in France, a View from the Ground

Coupling the subsidizing of housing in postwar France with an attempt to boost spatially, its economy led to an upheaval of diverging points of view, irrational decisions and opposite modes of organization. The lecture focuses on the construction and development of Les Ulis, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris that became through the sixties and the seventies an arena of negotiation between changing administrative regimes, residents‘ associations, private financial stakes, and architectural attempts at mediating these factors. It investigates the articulation of the political and social stakes on the ground with an architecture of the territory carried out at a national scale.

Sandra Parvu is an architect and urban studies scholar based in Paris. She teaches first-year studio and diploma in the “City, Architecture, Territory” department at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture in Paris Malaquais and an introductory seminar to research at the École nationale supérieure de paysage in Versailles. Her PhD investigated the relation between Modern Movement architecture, postwar urbanism, and housing policies in France. She is currently preparing a publication on landscape architecture practices and their visual strategies. She is the author of Grands ensembles en situation. Journal de bord de qua-tre chantiers (Geneva, 2011), Bande itinérante présente: Stalker à la Praille with Eunate Torres Modrego (Geneva, 2005), and Ensemble with Ines Schaber (Ulm, 2002).