Ville nouvelle, quarante ans après. Les pionniers vieillissants de Maurepas

Abstract

Through the impetus of the 1965 “Schéma directeur d’Aménagement et d’Urbanisme” (Strategic plan for land development and city planning), five new cities were built in the 1960s in the outskirts of Paris. Their development suggests the will to meet precise urban needs sometimes coupled with space availability, and services and equipment offers then thought of as innovative. Maurepas – until 1984 part of the new built-up area of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines - was shaped in part by these aspirations. Today, its population is ageing and its urban layout reflects power struggles and is characterized by partitioning and relative uniformity. The city’s design hints at a will to build “a new style of urban life” (Gladieu, 2003). During this evolution, trailblazing middle-class households settled the area and took centre stage. They were driven by a belief in a new city where everything was to be built and that offered new perspectives in terms of personal space. They are now over sixty. Forty years after they settled in, their discourse on the city shows several sources of tension: on the one hand, tensions between rural and urban areas, and on the other, tensions between adherence, differentiation and reflexivity. These tensions can be paralleled with the city’s evolution and the way public debates on urban forms are being framed. These different elements lead us to consider the existing resistances and projections as well as the subjectivization processes they sometimes reveal.

Keywords

• Maurepas
• new city
• residential dynamics
• city planning
• peri-urban
• cities