Housing Savages: Moral Reform in French Workers' Housing 1848-1889

The much studied expansion of social housing in the early twentieth century has overshadowed its ambivalent origins, rooted in the identification of the working-class as a politically and biologically dangerous group. This research project considers developments in workers' housing in France from 1848 to 1889, a period during

which the necessity of addressing the issue of poor living conditions was recognised at an institutional level. It aims to re-evaluate this seminal yet neglected period, by analysing the built environment as a space of political conflict and by studying the influence of policies aiming at moral reform on specific architectural designs.

In contrast to the text-based approach of previous works focusing on urban development, hygienist reforms or architectural debates, this study aims to underline the impact that the idea of moral reform had on the creation of buildings for workers through spatio-visual analysis. I will investigate the development of housing designs as a spatial expression of coercive projects such as acculturation, internal colonisation and segregation of the French working-class, aspects that existing research on later examples of social housing (post-1920s) has surprisingly overlooked.

Focusing on the oppositions within built space (confinement/street life, segregation/community, production/leisure, individuality/the collective) will show how these objectives were implemented in architectural form. By focusing on key examples, I will present how, as a quasi-ethnological discourse emerged around these 'savages' within bourgeois society, housing projects became part of a broad strategy (including hospitals, asylums, prisons, agricultural colonies) aiming to moralise its inhabitants via containment and total design.

In addition to their disciplinary function (limiting interactions, concentrating on the individual cell), shared material and spatial qualities determined the choice of these case studies in northern France.

The generic term 'social housing' both occludes the link with confining institutions and ignores how the transformation of workers' dwellings into Cités Ouvrières destroyed various forms of community and political activity. Existing research has neglected the interconnection between the creation of workers' housing, penal reform and colonialism, and hence overlooked how these processes all aimed to optimise the extraction of value from labouring and subdued populations.

Housing reform remains considered as a purely domestic phenomenon, and a critical study linking its emergence to the expansion of industry and empire has yet to be carried out. My emphasis on the architectural environment will shed new light on the imposition of strict models upon a given population by asking:

1. How did notions of surveillance and moral reform, developed in writings by philanthropists and social theorists, find a material expression in the first examples of collective workers' housing? 2. How did the transition from collective and urban models to individual and rural forms of workers' housing

embody the belief in the rehabilitative effects of nature and private property, while also laying the basis for experiments in colonial settlement overseas? 3. In what ways did these new architectural programmes, by giving a material form to a moralistic and Orientalist discourse, conflate different groups considered as 'savages' by elite opinion?

This research will also establish comparisons with both a British and a global setting. The interdisciplinary methodology I will apply in my work shall put forward the value of historical and transnational research in understanding the elements at play within the implementation of housing policy in France. It will illustrate how these origins allow us to interrogate and contextualise contemporary developments on a European scale.