Housing and riots

by George M. Chatzistergiou

Among the images of the international media from the riots that shook up the cities of France in November 2005 were not only street scenes and torched cars but also the buildings where the rioters lived. To many people the images of these vast complexes of mass habitation were new. In addition to triggering a debate about the correlation between housing conditions and insurgence, these images can also serve as the vehicle for looking into the practical aspects of the crisis.

The French housing estates that became associated with the recent riots are only a small portion of a huge project conceived and implemented by governments in western and northern Europe after the Second World War. The construction of these buildings in the first post-war decades was hail as a major social and architectural achievement, as they offered hitherto unknown comfort and facilities to low-income working-class families. Today, many of these projects are ‘problem areas’ with grave symptoms of social decline and many instances of drug abuse and criminal activities, and their demolition is an act of catharsis for the local communities.

There are many reasons behind this decline, but mostly it is that after the 1980s the state lost interest in their maintenance. Characteristically, some of these buildings which were refurbished and put on the market are now addressed to high-income residents, such as the Trellick Tower in Notting Hill, London, designed by Erno Goldfinger in the late 1960s. Another cause was the radical deterioration of the overall situation for lower incomes: the Rose-des-Vents complex at Aulnay-sous-Bouis, one of the hubs of the riots in France, had been built by Citroen as a model ‘city of 3,000 inhabitants’ for its employees’ families. After such major turning pints as the oil crisis of 1973-74, the crisis in the car industry in 1982-84 and the resultant mass layoffs, life quality at Rose-des-Vents fell dramatically. Those who aspired to better prospects sought them in other areas, and the flats were taken over by poorer people who could no longer afford the increased rents in the more central parts of Paris which had been improved upon government initiatives.

In their heyday such buildings were promoted as the ‘ocean liners of progress’ and appeared in French Nouvelle Vague films as the setting of the modern era; today, they feature in films such as those of Ken Loach as symbols of a depressing living environment. Interestingly, in Loach’s film My friend Ben the inhabitants of these decayed complexes are white, which suggests that the dividing line is not based so much on race but on the distinction between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. In any case the issues around the correlation between housing conditions and social unrest are complex and emerge differently across countries and times; they were seen in one way by Greek emigrants to Germany who had their minds on returning home, and in another way by Greeks in Australia. A typical example of the complex issues is the kind of riots that broke out in Birmingham, England in October, 2005 between inhabitants of different parts of the town, Asian (mostly Pakistanis) on the one hand and Afro-Caribbean on the other; the latter accused the former of racism and of keeping them in stagnation by not hiring them in their thriving businesses.

Confinement or social mobility?

The question of stagnation, as opposed to progress, may well be the key to approaching the situation in a meaningful way. In other words, if these bad housing conditions were part of a temporary phase in the evolutionary process of an open system, they problem might not assume such explosive dimensions. London’s East End, for instance, described as a “hell of poverty” by 19^th-century English writers, has received the waves of the poor and the persecuted over the centuries: the Huguenots who fled from France after the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the provincial Britons who arrived to seek work on the docks of the Thames, the Jews of Russia after the czarist pogroms in the 19^th century, immigrants from poor Asian countries today. Over time the region retained the characteristics of hard cheap labour and dire living conditions, but the population kept changing since during the economically and politically better times of the East End the earlier inhabitants were able to move to other areas with better housing. It is characteristic of these changes in the population that in the centre of the East End today’s Bangladeshi emigrants use as a mosque the same building that was a synagogue earlier and a Christian church before that.

This is not the case in today’s black ghettos like Chicago’s, as depicted in films such as Bulworth with Warren Beatty and Halle Berry or 8 Mile with the rapper Eminem. These tragic and fearful areas ‘where even the police won’t venture’ are not seen as ‘stages’ in the re-entry of their population into the procedures of the ‘upper world’ but as places for their confinement so as not to pose a threat to the rest of society. Of course, the result of this policy is that the confined areas function as “generators os intense violence and lawlessness” and even as “sources of potential civil war”, according to contemporary American thinkers.

So, social stagnation and confinement of specific population groups or social mobility and advancement of the society as a whole? This is how we must pose today some of the main issues that pertain not just to housing conditions but to the prospects of contemporary societies in general.