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Americas+1 212 318 2000
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Asia Pacific+65 6212 1000
The massive housing blocks of the Arlequin district in Grenoble remain a legacy of the PCF’s postwar urban development program.
Photographer: Jean-Pierre Clatot/AFP via Getty Images
The new book A Concrete Alliance explores the daring and divisive architecture built by the Communist Party of France in working-class towns of the 1960s and ’70s.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that there’s a left political party in an affluent Western country. It dominates in urban areas but struggles elsewhere; its working-class voter base has splintered with deindustrialization and more progressive, college-educated factions have emerged. As the nation becomes more multicultural, the party gets increasingly attuned to cultural and identitarian politics, but this doesn’t seem to bring in enough new voters. Meanwhile, a housing crisis rages in its own metropolitan centers of power as its once-influential urban development program founders.
This is not the story of the US Democratic party — it’s the Communist Party of France, or PCF. In the years after World War II into the 1970s and ’80s, the PCF was a powerful force of municipal policymaking, dominating Paris’ close-in suburbs, or banlieues. There, a tight community of party-affiliated architects designed social housing and other public buildings at the behest of local mayors.
