Some reflections on comparing (post-)suburbs in the US and France (Chapter 12)

Renaud Le Goix (1, 2)

1 UPD7 - Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7
2 GC (UMR_8504) - Géographie-cités

There are generic and specific terms for the places that English speakers routinely call suburbs. Interestingly, the term "banlieues à l’américaine" has been widely used by planners and residents to describe large master-planned subdivisions built in France after the 1960s; these have a positive connotations associated with their novelty and negative ones associated with a sense of the Americanization of urban landscape (Charmes, 2005; Gasnier, 2006). In the academic literature, the categories of suburbanization in France and the United States are often loosely compared, because of the obvious similarities of the suburban landscape produced by subdividers (see figure 12.1), but also because of the production dynamics dominated by large real estate developers, which have radically changed the way suburbs have been produced and named. The era of large cluster subdivisions – master-planned communities in the United States (late 1940s−1990s) and large development projects in France (1960s–990s) – introduced a clean break with previous stages of suburbanization. Referring to this, Lucy and Phillips (1997: 261) coined the expression “post-suburban era,” which they define “in terms of inner suburban population loss and relative income decline, suburban employment increase, suburban out-commuting reduction, exurban population and income increase, and farmland conversion.” “Post-suburban” describes the state of suburbanization in many countries (Wu and Phelps, 2008; Phelps and Wu, 2011; Keil and Young, 2011 ), insisting on the denser fabric of post-suburbanization in France and Europe and a slower transformation of the monocentric structure of metropolitan areas (Bontje and Burdack, 2011). Of course, a variety of terms have been used: while observing common patterns of urban sprawl, many French researchers, analysts, architects, and planners have borrowed American terms to refer to what has been happening at the fringes of French urban areas. This chapter examines some of the Anglo-American terminology used to name post-suburban dynamics in France. It discusses the problems associated with these naming practices, including that different phenomena are referred to by the same terms, and that this practice introduces interpretative bias in public policies and planning.

Mots clés: COUV; PARIS team

Domaines: Géographie; Architecture, aménagement de l'espace

Renaud Le Goix. Some reflections on comparing (post-)suburbs in the US and France (Chapter 12). Harris, R. and Vorms, C. What's in a Name? Talking about Suburbs, Toronto University Press, pp.320-350, 2017, 978-1442649606. ⟨halshs-02297626⟩