In connection with something else, I have been reading a French book, published in 1966, which addresses the question of neighborhood attachment: Henri Coing’s Rénovation urbaine et changement social. Outcome of an ethnographic study, it was written in the context of a working class area in Paris, undergoing urban renewal. There were similar studies in Britain and the United States during the same period, and in very similar contexts. But this one is exemplary in exploring how attachment was expressed and its precise material conditions. I’ve blogged on the topic before,[1] but this study gave extra dimensions to it.
The attachment was clearly intense: “If I had to leave, I think that I would always come back here. I could never live anywhere else. When I come back my heart goes crazy.” (p.46); and, “Its strange. When people talk of the 13th (arrondissement) they turn their noses up, but those who live there, they do not want to leave.” (p.44.) What is so brilliant about the study is the attention to the material conditions which induced these feelings. There were three analytically distinct dimensions to this. On the one hand, it was an area where one could be relatively self-sufficient. It was peppered with small shops, workshops, cafés and bars. You could live there, you could work there, and then have no need to go beyond. For many, the rest of Paris was like a foreign country. This meant that you encountered the same people on a regular basis. You were always running into neighbors, on the way to the shops, on the way to school to pick up the children, in the bar after work. You got to know people in all their concreteness. They were part of a very familiar landscape.
This effect was intensified by low turnover. People lived their entire lives there. You saw the same people at the communal wash house or in the café. Relations could develop to the point of trust. You patronized the same boulangerie, the same boucherie, day in, day out. The owner got to know you, your precise tastes, and would save something back for you: “Here they know you, you’re valued, you are not a number. The merchant chats with you, aware of the whole family, he asks about people, it’s not just the money that interests him.” (p.56.) The same applied to the small workshop owner and his workers: the pay might not be great but s/he liked you and you liked her/him.
The personal acknowledgement, the ease of social relations, extended beyond the commercial: “Shopping, celebrations, leisure activities, politics, are the most visible aspects of this common life … But they are only possible as a result of daily, commonplace contacts, in the context of a network of chance encounters, a familiarity resulting from residential proximity …” (p.62.)[2] And: “Everybody says ‘hello’ to me in the street, greets and asks for news, and you get information like a wardrobe someone wants to sell at a good price. I have lots of friends … those with whom I take a drink, those with whom I play cards, those who patronize the grocer’s where I drop by to shake hands on a Saturday. I know everybody.” (p.63.)[3] Just how important the face-to-face was, was underlined by the incomprehension of a more middle class woman who wanted to set up a rota with neighbors to collect the children from school. This was to create some time for herself. But they liked to go together, to chat, to make a purchase at a shop, to meet people.
Relations were then cemented by the fact of material deprivation. People were very poor and often shared a toilet or a water pump: but more reasons for chance encounters. The apartments were small, often overcrowded, so to go out into the street, to a café, even to the wash house, was a relief. Employed in the least remunerative of jobs, often unsteady in employment, hard times were common. But people helped one another and this was expected. Solidarity was the watchword: “In our neighborhood, the workers walk hand in hand. When you are absolutely broke, there is always someone who will give a helping hand and pull you out of it; whether you are Algerian, Italian, Spanish or French is of no significance, everybody locks elbows.” (p.78.)[4] This was expressed in the case of more mundane circumstances. At a time when TV ownership was more sporadic, you went and watched someone else’s TV, perhaps every evening. You shared watching the children. And with the less mundane: “With hard knocks, our apartment building becomes a real community. I saw that when my father died and when my wife gave birth. Everybody does something, each to his or her maximum, even those who you would not have expected.” (p.67.)[5]
The remarks on the politics of the neighborhood are particularly intriguing. A crucial observation was that voting for the Communist Party was not a personal choice deriving from private life: “The preponderance of the Communist Party goes back a long way and continues on the municipal level … Its significance is apparent through a diffuse influence where its publicity, its ways of thinking, spread like osmosis. In some apartment buildings, to not be communist means shutting out the shared life.” [insert French version.] And: “Political affiliation is not separable from the life of the neighborhood” (p.61.)[6] So ‘osmosis’, ‘inseparability’, and the way in which, through its meetings in the cafés, the party was one more basis for a shared social life.
This particular affiliation obviously owed a great deal to class consciousness, stoked by poverty and housing conditions. There was widespread awareness and suspicion of bourgeois practice. People took pride in their lack of formality and artifice; if you did not accept it, you were proud, a snob. There was a frankness of speech, (which could result in fights in bars) and a rejection of symbols of wealth; how it was the person that mattered. The formalities of the law were rejected since there was an awareness of how it smoothed away injustice. A hostility towards the establishment ran deep.
What sort of more general observations can one make from this? I have already noted how it fits into a particular theme in urban sociology research from the 50s and 60s. It does not anticipate what would happen as in some of that literature, ideas about the privatized, symmetrical family of Young and Wilmott, though some of its allusions are significant. The observation that voting for the Communist Party was not a personal choice deriving from private life harks back to some of the 60s literature on so-called neighborhood effects: the idea that people were influenced in their choices by the people around them. In a fascinating study of Sunderland, Brian Robson showed how attitudes to education for working class people reflected social composition. For those who made their connections elsewhere that was less the case. The bulk of the literature, though, referred to voting. An example actually refers to voting for the Communist Party in Paris in 1956: working class people were much more likely to vote for it in dominantly working class neighborhoods[7] Drawing on Coing’s study, though, one is struck by how much the issue of process should have been in question. It was framed in terms of individual vs neighborhood effects, in retrospective defiance of Coing’s claim that voting for the Communist Party was not a personal choice deriving from private life. The private/social now seems like the false distinction it always was; people made sense of the world through social pressures and also, one might imagine, solidarities. One suspects that with enhanced atomization and commodification of life, this might no longer seem to apply,[8] fortifying the still suspect notion of independent variables and conditions.
The other more general point of reference are Jane Jacobs’ observations about mixed-use urban development: the juxtaposition of the residential and commercial and the social interaction that it encouraged. Like Coing, she was writing in the context of urban renewal and how that had destroyed old working class geographies. But hers was a planner’s view, a blue print to which people might or might not adjust. Coing underlines the organic nature of these relations and the working class nature of the neighborhood that enhanced the liveliness of these relations. As J C Scott observed in Seeing Like a State, how people make sense of plans imposed from above is far from predictable.
[1] https://kevinrcox.wordpress.com/2021/06/12/the-question-of-local-attachment/
[2] « Activité commerciale, fêtes, loisirs, politique sont les aspects les plus visibles de cette vie commune … Mais ils ne sont possible que grâce à un soubassement des relations quotidiennes et banales, au réseau enchevêtré des rencontres fortuites, à la familiarité née de la proximité résidentielles, au voisinage. »
[3] « Tout le monde me dit bonjour dans la rue, one se salue, on se demande des nouvelles, on se donne des renseignements, une armoire à vendre, une bonne affaire. J’ai beaucoup d’amis … ceux avec qui je prends l’apéritif, ceux avec qui je joue la belote, les clients de l’épicerie où je vais donner un coup de main le samedi. Je connais tout le monde. »
[4] « Notre quartier, c’est des ouvriers qui marchent la main dans la main. Quand vous êtes dans la mouïse, il y a toujours un type pour vous tendre la main et vous tires de là ; que vous soyez Algérien, Italien, Espagnol, ou Français, ça n’a aucune importance, tout le monde se serre les coudes. »
[5] « En cas de coups durs, notre immeuble devient une vraie communauté : on l’a bien vu pour la mort de mon père, ou l’accouchement de ma femme ; tout le monde ne faisait qu’un, alors ; chacun a fait son maximum, même ceux dont on ne l’aurait pas cru. »
[6] « L’appartenance politique n’est pas séparable de la vie du quartier. » (p.61.)
[7] Kevin R. Cox (1971) in Economic Geography 47:1, 27-35.
[8] But compare with this recent statement on dealignment in American politics. The authors are commenting on a recent book, written by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol (Rust Belt Union Blues): “Another aspect of their book that complicates the class dealignment story is how they document the changing social and organizational environment in Western Pennsylvania. When industry was present and unions were strong, an overlapping and mutually reinforcing set of networks and organizations encouraged habitual voting for the Democratic Party. That’s your union local — the key anchoring institution in this situation — overlapping with your Catholic parish church down the street, with your Slovak fraternal organization and so on. Everyone living on your street has someone working in the same plant, they might walk to work together, and they drink together at the neighborhood bar after work every day. These have all eroded or disappeared, and to the extent that they’ve been replaced, there’s a pretty different set of institutions now. It’s gun clubs, police union locals, and evangelical megachurches overlapping with and reinforcing each other to encourage habitual voting for Republican candidates. Election season messaging, no matter how compelling it sounds, seems pretty thin compared to this.” (Chris Maisano and Jared Abbott, Debating class de-alignment; available here: https://jacobin.com/2024/03/debating-class-dealignment-democrats-republicans
Unfashionable Geographies 