Planning as a Welfare Project

Jean-Baptiste Minnaert

Professor of Contemporary Art History, Sorbonne Université

The conference ‘Planning as a Welfare Project’ took place at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris on 21–22 October 2021, under the auspices of the Centre André-Chastel (Sorbonne Université, CNRS, ministère de la Culture), with the kind support of the Danish Arts Foundation, to whom we express our warmest thanks. The friendly support of our colleagues from the Danish Centre of Urban History at the University of Aarhus greatly contributed to the quality of the papers and debates. The Groupe d’aménagement volontaire and the Groupe d’études géopolitiques (École normale supérieure-PSL) reinforced the symposium’s epistemological positions, particularly on the relationship between the Welfare State, spatial and urban planning.

Dorian Bianco, who organized this international colloquium with me, holds a PhD from Sorbonne University, Centre André-Chastel, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi. His thesis in the history of contemporary art, entitled The Models and the Realisations in Dense-Low Housing in Denmark (1947–1987). Building Standardisation, Neighbourhood Design and International Acculturations, defended in 2025, promises a bright future. The symposium represents a major milestone in his doctoral study, opening up research pathways within the field of planned communities in the second half of the twentieth-century Northern Europe and North America. One of the great merits of this colloquium has been to bring French research on the Welfare State into a stronger dialogue with international research, particularly from Northern Europe. The history of urban planning formed the disciplinary backbone of the symposium, but it was also imbued with the history of ideas, techniques and political economy, and drew upon the theoretical foundations of cultural transfers, cross-history and, more generally, the circulation of models, thus rendering a rich trans-disciplinarity that underpins the research objectives of the Centre André-Chastel.

We have identified a number of prominent issues among those raised by the symposium’s speakers. How do political and ideological tensions between the State and the market frame urban welfare policies? Is there a homothetic relationship, possible or fantasised, between a society and its built environment? From the bourgeois family homes of the eighteenth century to the suburban housing of the 1960s–1970s, is the family home an implicit model, or an explicit repudiation, of welfare? Is the social project of planning better expressed in open societies or in socialist ones? The Soviet Union would be a counter-example in this respect. The relationship between infrastructure and architecture is consubstantial with the Modern Movement doctrine born in the 1920s, but did the Welfare State and consumer society lead post-war architects to reinvent this relationship, as Jaap Bakema did in the Netherlands? Are the American Advocacy planning and Do-it-yourself movements of the 1960s alternatives to social planning, or just a remote part of it? Does photography frame the narrative of well-being, as the DATAR photographic mission in France in the 1980s would seem to show?