The Transformation of Le Plessis-Robinson

Le Plessis-Robinson is a suburb of Paris with about 30,000 inhabitants. The town has become a sort of parable of a possible alliance between conservative politics, aesthetics, neotraditional architecture, and urban renewal to create a better form of modern life. All of this fits together; the backers of Le Plessis-Robinson see public housing in concrete apartment blocks as a dehumanizing, oppressive, immiserating, destructive of real community and local identity, etc., and see beautification using forms drawn from local tradition as the path to a more human future.

An old village, Plessis-Robinson began to change in the 1920s when a couple of large "garden city" condominium complexes were built (above). 

Then, after World War II, a communist local government oversaw the construction of a whole bunch of concrete apartment blocks. By the 1980s the place was in terrible shape: 80 percent of the residents lived in public housing, and street-level shops had a 70 percent vacancy rate. Those concrete towers, some less than 25 years old, were in dismal shape. Crime was high. 

Then in 1989 a new mayor was elected, a neo-conservative named Philippe Pemezec. Asked to describe his plan for the town in one word, he said "beauty;" one of his fist acts was to order the planting of flowers around the center of the town.

Soon afterward he brought in architect François Spoerry, the inventor, leader, and possibly at that point the sole member of a movement he called l'architecture douce; soft architecture. Spoerry created a master plan for the town. The plan emphasized the building of new parks and a new central city, le Couer de Ville, which would be constructed in a neotraditional style which would reference older buildings in the Isle de France. 

The Couer de Ville measures 12 hectares, or 30 acres, and has a density of 69 people per acre, higher than the concrete blocks it replaced.

This was all financed via 1) public/private partnerships with developers, and 2) by allowing tenants in public housing the opportunity to buy their apartments, which could then be converted into housing in the newer buildings.

The design of the new town center draws on tricks widely used in the new urbanism, including resurrecting an old stream that had largely gone into culverts and turning it into a public park.

One point emphasized by Spoerry was eliminating what he considered ambiguous spaces; the lawns around the older apartment blocks were not really public spaces but they weren't private either, which he thought led to their abuse, since nobody was responsible for them. In the new design there is much public space, in the form of parks, but the rest is resolutely private.

Not everyone was happy with all of this, especially the converstion of public housing to privately owned condominiums and the involvement of private developers. But in a showdown election held in 1995, Pemezec defeated a communist candidate by more than 2 to 1, and rebuilding stormed ahead. 

The demolition of a group of college buildings from the 1950s created space for another new neighborhood, called Bois de Vallees.

In answer to critics of this project one can say: the population of the town has grown – it was 21,000 and declining when Pemezec became mayor, but is now 30,000 and rising – and grown more dense. Twenty percent of the new housing is public. The number of jobs has risen by 50 percent. Crime is down. Not a single person was forced out of public housing to make it happen. I haven't found out anything about how the people who took the deals to become owners of their public flats made out, and I know there was a lot of grumbling in England about rising interest rates and so on. But if there have been problems they haven't showed up in the public mood, which is much more positive than before, or in politics, since Pemezec was re-elected twice more by landslides.

And whatever you think of architecture like this (the cultural center), I think it beats more concrete blocks. In fact Plessis-Robinson has become a tourist center of sorts, people traveling hundreds of miles just to see this town's rebirth.

To me the political angle is actually the least interesting. I wrote here last summer about a new urban project in England that was entirely socialist, and I also thought that was great. To me what matters is: paying attention to what people want, which is overwhelmingly not concrete boxes; caring about beauty as a value it itself; being pragmatic about funding and planning; and thinking in the long term. We can make our world better if we put our minds to it, and we will reap the benefits of that in many ways.

Short article 1, short article 2, 13-minute video.