Abstract EN:

The purpose of this study, which is based on the analysis of a corpus of literary texts and artistic and press images, is to develop an approach to the paris suburbs based on the interrelationship between a scientific objective and artistic creation. It focuses on the way in which the sanitarian ideology and the naturalist current produced a system of + luminous ; symbols (the suburbs being portrayed as residential, festive and synonymous with progress) that contrasted with the + gray ; symbols of confined, industrial and dump-like suburbs that evoked unhealthiness and moral and social danger. During a period marked by organicism, philanthropic ideology attempted to rationalize the sickish working-class suburbs as being a whole, healthy and therefore harmless organ of a vast social body. The construction of low-cost housing was the heritage of this model order and became, in the middle-class mind, the solution to the immorality of the supposedly dangerous working classes, whose economic and social dependency was to be denounced by the ideological arguments of the myth of the + red suburbs ; and the populist school. Functionalistic architecture, inspired from collectivist systems, responded to the relatively anarchic housing of the time by producing standardized suburban group housing. The suburbs - during the period of economic prosperity and widespread home construction from 1950 to 1980- became identified with housing. The parisian suburbs entered france's cultural sphere in 1990, and -as the melting pot of a new type of+ living ; culture- has become a producer of imagery.