This book considers the post-68 French city as a prism through which to understand the contemporary world and France's specificity within it. The reader is invited to join in a series of exploratory strolls through texts, buildings, and neighborhoods, and thereby share in a process of discovery. Zeroing in on international architectural debates, a range of key Parisian exhibitions, and major urban design decisions in Paris, Montpellier, and Lille, Yaari unravels an often-acerbic French critique of both modern and postmodern positions on culture, technology, and the city. This critique-stemming from the competing claims of national identity, the ethics of architecture and display, and an anthropologically informed revision of prevailing views on the city-has sparked in France a passionate search for a third path, which the author proposes to term apres-moderne. Breaking new ground in the field of French Studies through cultural analysis of the contemporary city, this study brings new insight to scholars and professionals in architecture and urbanism, and will interest all others for whom France and cities in general hold special appeal. Monique Yaari is a specialist of twentieth-century French literary and cultural studies. For the past decade, her research has focused on the contemporary city. The author of Ironie paradoxale et ironie poetique: sur les traces de Gide dans Paludes (Summa Publications, 1988) as well as numerous articles on contemporary French art and architecture, Professor Yaari teaches in the Culture and Civilization option of the Department of French and Francophone Studies at The Pennsylvania State University.

Latin American cities have always been characterized by a strong tension between what is vaguely described as their formal and informal dimensions. However, the terms formal and informal refer not only to the physical aspect of cities but also to their entire socio-political fabric. Informal cities and settlements exceed the structures of order, control and homogeneity that one expects to find in a formal city; therefore the contributors to this volume - from such disciplines as architecture, urban planning, anthropology, urban design, cultural and urban studies and sociology - focus on alternative methods of analysis in order to study the phenomenon of urban informality. This book provides a thorough review of the work that is currently being carried out by scholars, practitioners and governmental institutions, in and outside Latin America, on the question of informal cities.

Offers the best essays from the acclaimed collection originally published in French. This monumental work examines how and why events and figures become a part of a people's collective memory, how rewriting history can forge new paradigms of cultural identity, and how the meaning attached to an event can become as significant as the event itself.

This book focuses on the philosophy, politics and impact of the 'New Right' which originated in France and has since influenced activism, ideology and policy in a number of European countries. This book explores the idea that revolutionaries do not necessarily need to come from the left, nor use arms in order to overturn liberal democracy. In the post-World War Two era, the extremists of the revolutionary right took three different paths: 1) parliamentary; 2) extra-parliamentary; and 3) metapolitical. The New Right (nouvelle droite – ND in France) took the metapolitical path, but that did not mean it abandoned its revolutionary desire to smash liberal democracy throughout Europe. The book examines four interpretations of the New Right. These interpretations include the following: 1) The New Right as a fascist or quasi-fascist movement; 2) The New Right as a challenge to the traditional right-left dichotomy, which has structured European political debates for more than 200 years; 3) The New Right as an alternative modernist movement, which rejects liberal and socialist narratives of modernity; accepts the technical but not political or cultural effects of modernity; and longs for a pan-European political framework abolishing liberal multiculturalism and privileging ethnic dominance of so-called original Europeans; and 4) The New Right as a variant of political religion and conversionary processes. The book concludes by analysing the positions, cultural and political impact, and relationship to democracy of the New Right. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of racism, fascism, extremism, European politics, French politics and contemporary political theory.

Les Lieux de mémoire is perhaps one of the most profound historical documents on the history and culture of the French nation. Assembled by Pierre Nora during the Mitterand years, this multivolume series has been hailed as "a magnificent achievement" (The New Republic) and "the grandest, most ambitious effort to dissect, interpret and celebrate the French fascination with their own past" (The Los Angeles Times). Written during a time when French national identity was undergoing a pivotal change and the nation was struggling to define itself, this unprecedented series consists of essays by prominent historians and cultural commentators which take, as their points of departure, a lieu de mémoire: a site of memory used to order, concentrate, and secure notions of France's past. The first volume in the Chicago translation, Rethinking France, brings together works addressing the omnipresent role of the state in French life. As in the other volumes, the lieux de mémoire serve as entries into the French past, whether they are actual sites, political traditions, rituals, or even national pastimes and textbooks. Volume I: The State offers a sophisticated and engaging view of the French and their past through widely diverse essays on, for example, the château of Versailles and the French history of absolutism; the Code civil and its ordering of French life; memoirs written by French statesmen; and Charlemagne and his place in French history. Nora's authors constitute a who's who of French academia, yet they wear their erudition lightly. Taken as a whole, this extraordinary series documents how the French have come to see themselves and why. Contributors: Alain Guéry Maurice Agulhon Bernard Guenée Daniel Nordman Robert Morrissey Alain Boureau Anne-Marie Lecoq Hélène Himelfarb Jean Carbonnier Hervé Le Bras Pierre Nora

The city in the twenty-first century faces major challenges, including social and economic stratification, wasteful consumption of resources, transportation congestion, and environmental degradation. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities and major metropolitan areas, and in the next two decades the number of city dwellers is estimated to reach five billion. This puts enormous pressures on transportation systems, housing stock, and infrastructure such as energy, waste, and water, which directly influences the emissions of greenhouse gases. As the long emergency awaits us, urgent questions remain: How will our cities survive? How can we combat and reconcile urban growth with sustainable use of resources for future generations to thrive? Where and how urbanism comes into the picture and what “sustainable” urban forms can do in light of these events are some of the issues Sustainable Urbanism and Beyond explores. With more than sixty essays, including contributions by Andrés Duany, Saskia Sassen, Peter Newman, Douglas Farr, Henry Cisneros, Peter Hall, Sharon Zukin, Peter Eisenman, and others, this book is a unique perspective on architecture, urban planning, environmental and urban design, exploring ways for raising quality of life and the standard of living in a new modern era by creating better and more viable places to live.

This provocative look at France’s relationship with the Arab world offers a “bracing mix of journalism and history [that] couldn’t be more timely” (Mitchell Cohen, The New York Times Book Review). To fully understand the social and political pressures wracking contemporary France—and, indeed, all of Europe—we must look beyond domestic issues. Unemployment, economic stagnation, and social deprivation certainly exacerbate the ongoing turmoil in the banlieues. But, as Andrew Hussey demonstrates here, the root of the problem lies in the continuing fallout from Europe’s colonial era. Hussey draws on his deep knowledge of history, literature, and politics as well as his years of personal experience in France, Algeria, and other Arab countries, to provide a nuanced, holistic view of the present situation. In the course of teasing out the myriad interconnections between past and present, The French Intifada shows that the defining conflict of the twenty-first century will not be between Islam and the West but between two dramatically different experiences of the world—the colonizers and the colonized.

The material heritage of the colonial era is built into Africa’s cities, from their urban layouts, to their architecture, monuments and street names. This book discusses the varying responses to colonial heritage in West African cities, with a particular focus on the case studies of Praia in Cape Verde, Dakar in Senegal and Banjul in The Gambia. Europeans tended to focus on cities as centres of administration, and they were often both the starting points for settlement and the locations in which power was formally handed over to new African governments. Colonialism in Praia, Dakar and Banjul was abolished at different times, under different colonial powers (Portuguese, French and British) and amongst vastly different conditions of unrest. Based on extensive original research, this book demonstrates that the contemporary approach to the contentious issue of urban colonial heritage is often determined by metropolis-colony relationship before decolonisation, postcolonial diplomatic relations as well as present-day political decisions. The book uncovers a rich relationship between politics and urban space, and between new and old. Combining insights from political sciences, history, critical geography, heritage studies and urban planning, this book will be of interest to a wide range of researchers.

Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City is the first cultural history of major new parks developed in Paris in the late twentieth century, as part of the city's program of adaptive reuse of industrial spaces. Thanks to laws that gave the city more political autonomy, Paris's local government launched a campaign of park creation in the late 1970s that continued to the turn of the millennium. The parks in this book represent this campaign and illustrate different facets of their cultural and historical context. Archival research, interviews, and analyses of the parks reveal how postmodern debates about urban planning, the historic city, public space, and nature's presence in an urban setting influenced their designs. In sum, the city adopted the garden as a model for public parks, investing in complex, richly symbolic and representational spaces. These parks were intended to represent contemporary twists on traditional designs and serve local residents as much as they would contribute to Paris's role as a world city. The parks' development process often included points of conflict, pointing to differing views on what Parisian space should represent and fundamental contradictions between the characteristics of public space and the garden as it is traditionally defined. These parks demonstrate the ongoing cultivation of the city over time, in which transformed sites not only fulfil new functions but also engage with history and their surroundings to create new meaning. They stand for landscape as a form of signifying cultural production that directly engages with other art forms and ways of knowing. Just as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, and the Buttes-Chaumont parks exemplify their eras' cultural dynamics, such parks as the Jardin Atlantique, Parc André-Citroën, and the Jardin des Halles express contemporary French culture within the archetypal space of their era, the city. Finally, they point the way to current trends in landscape architecture, such as citizen gardening and ecological initiatives.