| Popis: |
Urbanists have long condemned the reconstruction of France after the Great War as a failure. Articulated in the 1920s, this distorted view has largely gone unchallenged and continues to frame the historiography. This article revisits dominant assessments of the post-1918 urban reconstruction and positions the mobilization of French urbanists in the wider transition from war to peace. Urban reconstruction underlined the uncertain nature of the aftermath of the conflict and proved both contested and uneven. While French urbanists imputed its failure to the local populations, this article argues that, if failure there was, it should be laid at their feet. Urbanists proved unable to apprehend the specificities of the post-war reconstruction and of the political economy in which they, as well as the devastated cities, had to operate. As those practitioners floundered, key tenets of urbanist thinking nonetheless prevailed. |
