They are called the Quartier des Rives du Cher in Tours (Indre-et-Loire), Haut-du-Lièvre in Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle), Quartier des États-Unis in Lyon (Rhône-Alpes), La Grande Borne in Grigny (Essonne) and Cité des 3000 in Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis).
For most people, however, they are simply known as les grands ensembles. These are high-rise public housing units constructed in and around French cities following World War Two – a vertical horizon of grey, cold concrete on France’s urban peripheries.
Marseille alone has eight of them and Wikipedia lists 113 throughout the country.
Urban nightmare
They had a laudable aim – to meet France’s critical housing needs from the 1950s to the mid-1960s – but something turned sour.
Grands ensembles have slowly become synonymous with criminality, poverty, social exclusion and religious separatism, to the extent that many are now being demolished. No longer symbols of an architectural utopia, they have rather turned into urban metastases.
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It started so differently. In the early 1950s, the French government realised the country was facing a serious housing problem. Destruction from the war, the baby boom, a growing rural exodus and increasing immigration were all contributing factors.
Three million housing units were lacking in 1954 and many people piled up in apartments, often with substandard electrical systems and no running water. The poorest lived in slums around the periphery of Paris.
“Building 20,000 houses per month is a life-or-death matter,” said Eugène Claudius-Petit, the ministry in charge of reconstruction effort and urbanism, in 1952 – an annual goal of 240,000 houses per year.
Enter the Grands ensembles, multi-storeyed buildings of various shapes and sizes with facades of concrete or prefabricated panelling often called barres or tours in French.
Solution to booming population
At the same time the French population grew from 43 to 53 million from 1954 to 1974, housing units ballooned from 12 to 21 million. Some 350 Grands ensembles, comprising 1,000 units each, sprung up on the periphery of many French cities.
Informing their design were the architectural principles of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, in the Athens charter in 1933, a document breaking the rules of urban planning which organised cities around public spaces, parks and streets in town centres.
Modernity lies in large-size residential units blooming away from the town centre, giving them complete autonomy, wrote Philippe Verdier in Le Projet urbain participatif. Apprendre à faire la ville avec ses habitants in 2009, deciphering the charter.
The best example of what Grands ensembles hoped to become is Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille. Mr Corbusier called it a cité-jardin verticale (a vertical garden-city).
The 337-unit building aimed to free women from household chores, and was ordered in sections to bind residents together. It has a mid-level laundry floor, a rooftop pool for leisure and sport, and a medical centre.
In lieu of Cités radieuses, which remains an architecture oeuvre in itself, Mr Corbusier called the Grands ensembles buildings ‘machines à habiter’ (machines for living).
There was nothing radieux about them.
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Les grands ensembles and social problems
The first complaints emerged around the mid-1960s, as more buildings were still being assembled. They needed maintenance, nearby shops and residents complained there was nothing nearby to do.
Actor Jean Gabin wallowed in nostalgia in the 1963 crime drama Any Number Can Win, as his character realises “the green zone” of the Sarcelles Paris suburb he grew up in has been turned into concrete towers. “The green zone looks like New York,” he memorably commented.
It seemed, moreover, like residents were affected by a strange disease. It was called sarcellite by a journalist, who took the name from the same suburban town, after an inhabitant threw himself out of a window.
Claude Mezrahi listed the symptoms in his 1986 book Regards et témoignages sur Sarcelles: allergies, depression, hypertension and anxiety, with attempts to escape the daily grind via alcohol, smoking and drugs.
In 1973, the government signed the Guichard circulaire which, for the first time, used the term Grands ensembles. It finally pulled the plug on the project and moved onto a brand new one: politique de la ville, an urban policy aiming at restoring these areas their pride.
Experts have their own take on why the Grands ensembles failed.
““The reason… is first and foremost the lack of clarity on the part of the public authorities regarding this type of housing,” said Thibault Tellier, a teacher at Sciences Po Rennes and author of 2024’s Une histoire de la banlieue.
“Was it intended to promote a new type of housing, a symbol of the modernity of the Trente Glorieuses, or was it, on the contrary, intended to be a forced but necessary detour for French families whose dream was to own a detached house? The question has never really been settled.”
The middle-classes clearly decided it was the latter, shunning the buildings as soon as they had saved enough money to buy a property further away from town centres that offered peace and quiet and greater proximity to nature.
Disrepair and demolition
The people who replaced them were poorer, mostly immigrants, who moved into dwellings that had turned decrepit over time. Municipalities left many of these buildings in states of acute disrepair
Despite politique de la ville, governments increased the demolition of these high-rise buildings in the late 1990s-early 2000s.
Some 5,500 units were demolished in 1999 alone. Perhaps the most emblematic to suffer this fate was the Cité des 4000 in La Courneuve (Seine-Saint-Denis) where three towers were demolished between 2000 and 2004.
Nevertheless, there have been growing calls to protect the heritage of surviving Grands ensembles.
“La banlieue, it’s daisies on a dung heap,” said French rapper Médine on his track Grand Paris, suggesting the grim tower blocks have nevertheless provided fertile soil for modern French culture.
“The country should keep traces of them,” said Mr Tellier.
Indeed, Jacques Henri-Labourdette, the architect of the Grands ensemble of Sarcelles, had a street named after him in 2012.
And an organisation called Amulop is campaigning to set up a museum chronicling daily life in these towers within one of the buildings.
“Grand ensemble architects have not built ghettos. We should remember their original function: to house people,” said Mr Tellier.
