LoGHiS

The LoGHis project aims to renew the history of working-class housing in Seine-Saint-Denis, a district of the Paris area which supposedly embodies the “crisis” of the French banlieues (suburbs). Today, the prevailing narrative is largely centred on the decline, since the 1970s, of large public housing complexes; this contributes to the stigmatizing discourses targetting their inhabitants, who are supposed to live there only for lack of a better choice. The goal of this project is to confront these common representations with an analysis of the housing trajectories of families living in working-class neighbourhoods to the north of Paris, over several generations. The research hypothesis is that these movements should not be analyzed merely from the standpoint of constraint and relegation, but rather in relation to family resources and strategies that foster local roots over time. To achieve this, the project will capture and compare the housing trajectories of people living in four neighbourhoods, each featuring a different type of housing units (Cité des 4000 in La Courneuve, individual houses in the Monfort neighbourhood in Aubervilliers, a tenement building in the Quatre-Chemins area in Aubervilliers, and an HBM building in the Plaine-Saint-Denis). The data collection will take place over several generations and at the micro level of a few buildings and streets. The aim is to track the life courses of the inhabitants’ forebears and of their descendants, in the early 1960s (considered as the “golden age” of large-scale housing projects) and the early 1990s (commonly regarded as a time of crisis). Multiple source types will be used: tenant and property files, census household sheets, census lists, but also testimonies gathered for the project, through interviews and participatory workshops. In so doing, the project will strive to renew the historical methods applied to working-class neighbourhoods, by placing people’s experience front and center.