Into the Cold: Neighborliness, Class, and the Emotional Landscape of Urban Modernism in France and West Germany

Abstract

In France and West Germany, public opinion on modernist mass housing switched from positive to negative over a short period of time. The following article explores and compares this disenchantment with urban modernism in both countries. Analyzing TV documentaries, press reports, and sociological studies, as well as inhabitants’ reactions to them, it traces the discursive production of modern high-rise estates as arenas of social and emotional malfunction. It investigates how contemporaries came to contrast the apparent desolation of modernist high-rises on the periphery of French and West German cities with the warmth and solidarity of traditional working-class neighborhoods. Tracing the genesis of this socio-emotional framing, the article foregrounds the influence of psychological discourses and a new left-wing activism on contemporary urbanism and highlights the local repercussions of modern housing’s public denigration in France and West Germany.