Breathe In- Breathe Out

I hope you enjoyed the song that I used to start the seminar on monday. For me, it is really atmospheric, thought provoking and soulful in the tradition of the very best music inspired by the urban environment. Black Star are Brooklyn rappers Mos Def and Talib Kweli and their only album ' Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star' was released in 1998. The title is a reference to the Black Star Line, a shipping line founded by Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. Many respected lists rightfully have it as an all-time classic of hip-hop. Watch the video of the sing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeTnog5RRQo

I think you'll agree it does the song justice.

The song that I played- 'Respiration'- also features Chicago rapper Common. I previously played two of his tracks in class, 'The Corner' and 'I Used to Love H.E.R.'. Why use hip-hop in an academic context? Surely academia is about 'high culture' and hip-hop is base, popular or 'low culture'? Not at all. Well, first hip-hop is an example of what Paul Gilroy, in his famous text The Black Atlantic calls 'expressive culture', creative acts that communicate socio-cultural, ideological, political, aesthetic and personal aspects of living. In other words, hip-hop offers access to the experience of groups that we may not be able to access otherwise, often because these are groups that tend to be 'spoken for' rather than heard speaking for themselves. Hip-hop offers a counter culture to that of modernity, it supplies for its intended audience some of the courage needed to go on living in the present. Hip-hop stars like Mos Def can be said to act like 'organic intellectuals'. This is a notion used by Antonio Gramsci to describe working class intellectuals who, unlike bourgeois intellectuals, maintain links with local issues and struggles that connect to the people and their experiences. They also use their grounded positionality to cultivate strategies for helping their communities to develop a self-inspired, organic consciousness. Second, and this is a related point, the best hip-hop lyrics can be used to reinforce aspects of academic theory and they can also be used to get us to think about academic ideas in a new light. The main refrain of the song, that evokes a living, breathing city- 'breath in, breath out' is fascinating and can be thought of against many academic understandings of the city- dual city, bulimic city, centripetal/ centrifugal space etc. The hip-hop lyrics offer a more poetic reading of the city that demands reflection. Try for yourself!

Obsessed With Gloom? Urbex and the other city

I certainly don't wish to base all my entries on articles that have appeared in the Evening Standard but there was a fantastic piece on monday about urban exploration, or 'urbex' for short.

Urbex is the art of accessing or trespassing parts of the city that are 'off limits'. Very often this involves entering abandoned industrial sites such as factories, decaying prisons, hospitals or lunatic asylums and below ground sites such as catacombs, tunnels or 'ghost' tube stations (stations that are no longer in service). Urban explorers are often interested in photography and they attempt to capture the full beauty of decrepitude in their photos (the amazing photo above is of Essex County Lunatic Asylum at Warley and was taken by Simon Cornwell).

Urban exploring often involves trespassing but rarely breaking and entering. Urbexers don't believe in vandalising the buildings, they simply want to preserve the decay they find in the hidden histories of the city. However, it can be a dangerous hobby as many old buildings have rotting floors, asbestos and faulty electrics.

If you're interested, check out this website: http://www.simoncornwell.com/urbex/frames.htm

Or this forum:

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/

For an academic analysis of fascination for urban ruins look at Tim Edensor's excellent book, 'Industrial Ruins'

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Industrial-Ruins-Space-Aesthetics-Materiality/dp/1845200772/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268826782&sr=1-1

I guess an interest in the hidden or secret history of the city is very much a result of people's growing boredom with the gentrified, ordered, pacified spaces of consumption that characterise so much of the modern metropolis. There is always the other city, no matter how hard we try to repress it.

Dual City- London's Dispossessed

Next week we begin topic four which links together the notion that 'global cities' such as London and New York are increasingly divided between the very, very rich and very, very poor with street crime and corporate crime. In preparation for this I suggest that you follow the Evening Standard this week as they are running a 5-day special on 'the dispossessed'. The tag line for yesterday's first instalment was: 'London is a shameful tale of two cities. In the richest capital in Europe almost half our children live below the poverty line. These families are cut off from the life most Londoners take for granted. They are the dispossessed'. Yesterday's issue had a feature on modern day pauper's graves (harking back to Victorian London- those who went on the walk will remember this) and single mum who who lives on an estate in Southwark just four stops from the financial centre of Canary Wharf although she has never seen it up close. While people in London's reviralised Docklands bring home huge salaries and live in multi-million pound apartments, she cannot afford a cot for her baby.

It promises to be an interesting series of reports... every night this week in the Evening Standard.

From Style Wars to Turf Wars?

"I aint no perfect man i'm tryna do the best I can with what it is I have..." Mos Def 'Umi Says'

If Naked City captured New York at the moment preceding urban renewal then Style Wars surely depicts the city at the moment before gentrification enveloped many neighbourhoods in the 1980s and the city became almost a succession of bland districts with a uniform aesthetic formed from that noxious coalescence of Starbucks, French bistros and twee florists.

There is something about the spirit of the kids in this documentary that is infectious. It is also revealing of the role that urban cultures play in the making or production of the city. There is also a degree of nostalgia when viewing the decaying, yet colourful streets and subways of NYC in the 1970s. We simply don't get to see the city in this way nowadays.

The origins of hip-hop as portrayed in the film also demonstrate the cultural potentials inscribed within urban living. The incredible energy and creativity of the youth of the ‘seven mile world’ of the South Bronx perhaps serves as a defence of the urban against its detractors. Could any other dwelling arrangement produce equally pulsating expressive cultural forms?

Of course, NYC in the mid-70s was no urban utopia. The city was bankrupt, public services were being withdrawn or downsized and many of the failings of urban renewal- especially the public housing projects and racial segregation- were becoming apparent. In some ways the graffiti movement represents the 'return of the repressed'- the original slum dwellers, African Americans and Puerto Ricans; all those groups confined to the city margins by Robert Moses' urban renewal programmes. As E.P. Thompson reminds us culture is always a response or to a shared set of constraints- an articulation of identity based upon common experiences. The subway graffiti writers- through the processes of ‘getting up’, 'bombing' and going 'all city'- were staking their claim on the city, making names for themselves and very literally making a mark on a city hell bent on ignoring them (see the story about the Freedom Train). Crucially the writers were anything but passive victims of oppressive forces; they were engaged daily (and nightly!) in producing their city. Graffiti is evidence of the active presence of marginalized groups in the city. The city isn't just something that is produced around them.

It is difficult to imagine a new sub-culture with as much vitality as hip-hop emerging from NYC today. Yes, there is pastiche, nostalgia, hyped musical trends and so on and of course there is still hip-hop. Yet this is vastly different to the sounds that first emanated from the South Bronx. Contemporary hip-hop- from the mid-1990s onwards is more likely to depict the brutal, aggressive and sexually violent streets of the deteriorating and ever more alienated projects, a shift in emphasis that perhaps reflects Wacquant’s suggestion that the communal ghettos of the past have become hyper-ghettos characterized by fear, violence and mutual hatred. Compare for example (and rather selectively) Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdtcwtIxO4s&feature=PlayList&p=4D3CC987B375F879&index=3) with Mobb Deep’s bleak ‘Survival of the fittest’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf_dsmUHnTw&feature=related). Both speak of life on the harsh streets of NYC yet the latter portrays a world completely devoid of positivity or urbanity. Of course, both are examples of expressive culture produced under constraints, yet it appears that constraints have hardened, the divides between neighbourhoods- or territories- are more fiercely defended and that hope has all but disappeared.

The point is also that while life in the projects and ghettos becomes even more constricting, many ordinary working class neighbourhoods- possible escape routes- have gentrified, their original residents replaced by the middle classes. Gentrifiers like graffiti though- the gentrifier’s habitus is predisposed towards endorsing authentic ‘street art’- since it reflects well upon their self-consciously liberal ethic. The aesthetic of gentrification celebrates local colour and diversity, yet when these elements threaten to overwhelm or compromise the ‘order’ and ‘security’ that gentrifiers also value any polluting elements are purged. Graffiti is only welcomed in its place- hanging in galleries or homes and on specially commissioned pieces. Here, graffiti becomes art (traditionally conceived)- it is stripped of its original subcultural significance and removed from the endeavour, risk and energy that characterises true subway graffiti.

More in the next couple of days…

Black Belt- Red Belt

Loic Wacquant (a French sociologist working in the US) has made a direct comparison between the North American ghetto (the black belt) and the banlieues on the periphery of Paris (the red belt- so called because of their historica association with the Communist party). This comparison is based on his research in Chicago and the Quatre Mille (les 4000) a public housing estate in the Parisian suburb of La Courneuve (also where I have carried out research). As we have already learned, the Parisian banlieues have suffered from deindustrialisation and the collapse of manufacturing jobs. As a consequence they have achieved increasing notoriety as zones of social disorder, with focus especially centred on ‘lawless’ minority ethnic youth (often of North African origin) who periodically clash with the police (the last major riots were in 2005- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_France).

Wacquant argues that the banlieue and the ghetto share certain common features, not least a powerful ‘territorial stigma’ that is attached to living in a devalued space. Residents have to live with the indignity of living in the ghetto or banlieue, a stigma that results from the poverty that curses each area. For Wacquant, such spaces are the 'dumping grounds' of the city- site to contain an economically superfluous population. Both spaces also share similarities in terms of the bleak and oppressive atmosphere that suffuses them. Both spaces are also wrongly perceived as socially disorganised (see Wacquant's 'three pernicious premises' from monday's lecture).

Yet, despite these similarities- which often have more to do with perception rather than reality- the black belt and red belt are actually very different socio-spatial formations, produced by different institutional logics of segregation which results in ‘significantly higher levels of blight, poverty and hardship in the ghetto’.

Despite European societies experiencing similar neo-liberal economic restructuring to the US, they have not produced equivalent pathologies to those associated with the American city. As Wacquant states, when it comes to size, assimilating US ghettoes and the French banlieue is like matching heavyweights and flyweights. For example, the ghettoes of New York alone house a million blacks, while the largest banlieue estates only house around 35,000. Whilst joblessness is a problem in both the ghetto and banlieue, unemployment stands at around 50% in the banlieue while in Chicago’s projects barely 16% of residents held a job. Yet it is not just the extent and depth of wealth and income inequalities in the US that distinguish the ghetto from the banlieue. It is also the extent of racial segregation. Comparative studies of ethnic segregation suggest that levels of segregation for African-Americans are far higher than those found among minority ethnic groups in Europe and the UK. The US ghetto is racially homogenous, it is a legacy of slavery and a mechanism of racial confinement- ‘an apparatus aimed at enclosing a stigmatised category in a reserved physical and social space that will prevent it mixing with others and thus risk tainting them’.

Although ethnic enclaves can be found in France and the UK, they do not take the ghetto form found in North American cities. In French estates the social composition is drawn from a variety of ethnic groups. They typically bring together persons of West African, European and Maghrebine descent- ‘black, blanc, beur’ as they are sometimes stereotypically referred (La Haine's characterisation is an example of this). Even within the categories of black, blanc, beur, the nations of origin among banlieue residents are incredibly diverse.

The intensity of racial segregation and disadvantage in American cities combined with the intensity of poverty and paucity of welfare provision are therefore qualitatively different from the circumstances that can be found in European cities. There are also disparities in terms of criminality. While the French media create panics around banlieue disorder such as aggressive behaviour, vandalism and petty theft, in the American ghetto physical violence is ‘a palpable reality that overturns the parameters of ordinary existence'. According to Wacquant, such is the frequency of robberies, assaults and homicides that it has caused the virtual disappearance of public space. The homicide rate in the US is 75 times that of France.

The final divergence between the banlieue and the ghetto concerns the condition of public housing. Wacquant states that the historic African American neighbourhoods of New York, Chicago and Philadelphia have the look of war zones- abandoned or crumbling buildings, carcasses of burnt out stores, rotting factories, boarded up homes and vacant lots filled with garbage and rubble. In contrast, degraded working class banlieue have undergone considerable state assisted renovation. Buildings have been repainted, refitted or demolished. This may paper over the cracks, or mask deep-seated social problems but the environment is not as degraded as that found in the ghetto.

Urban Outcasts

I hope those of you who came on the walk yesterday enjoyed it- despite the cold- and learned a lot about Victorian London. One of the most interesting aspects, I think, is that the 'past city' we toured is still very much 'present', many buildings remain (even if they have been turned into luxury apartments) and the ghosts of the Victorain city remain just around every corner. On the topic of ghosts and the dead, if any of you are interested in the crossbones cemetary, the paupers grave that we visited in Red Cross Street, please see the link below:
http://www.crossbones.org.uk/

Sorry I had to dash off halfway through the walk. I had to make it to University of Surrey at Guildford where I was giving a seminar on my research in the Parisian banlieues (housing estates), with my colleague Dr David Garbin. My research on this topic links very clearly with our next topic on urban outcasts. As such, I provide some history of La Courneuve and the 'Cite des 4000' where we carried out our research. This is taken from the seminar that we gave yesterday. It will give you a flavour of what is to come on monday. And of course, it's also relevant because we will be watching a French film- La Haine. See link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Haine


From our seminar:

"La Courneuve is a banlieue (suburb) situated on the northeastern periphery of Paris in the Seine-Saint-Denis département (‘le 93’). It is part of what is known as the ‘red belt’ of Parisian suburbs because of their historical association with the communist party, due in no small part to the concentration of industry in this region. In fact, despite high rates of unemployment in La Courneuve, the town still has a communist mayor to this day.

Why was it built? During the post-war period nearby Paris struggled to meet the housing demands of its rapidly rising workforce. The housing shortage was exacerbated by the arrival of around a million ‘pieds noirs’ (returning French settlers from Algeria) in 1962. Consequently, La Courneuve like other suburbs of the city that at the time resembled a slum or shantytown was designated a ‘Zone à Urbaniser en Priorité’ (ZUP), an ‘area to be urbanised quickly’.

Industrial techniques that maximised size, speed and density for minimum cost were used to build large, dense housing estates on the peripheries of Paris. Designs were utilitarian and inspired by Le Corbusier’s pronouncement that houses were mere ‘machines for living in’ (machines à vivre). This rather prescriptive view fitted with the tradition of the paternalistic and also hygienist French state. This belief in the urban solution encouraged the mechanised construction of repetitive and monotonous estates that almost made architectural input redundant.

The largest of these housing projects, including les 4000 became known as the grands ensembles. The quatre mille in La Courneuve, so-called because it contains 4000 housing units, is one of the grands ensembles. Finally, by 1975 France had built enough dwellings to be in balance with the number of households-some achievement. Yet these quantifiable housing ‘successes’ would cause huge social strains in the 1980s and beyond."

Later this week, I'll post something about the banlieues riots of 2005. The picture above is of the CRS (riot police) outside one of the buildings in the estate that we based our research.

Darkest Victorian London

Just a reminder about the guided walk on monday morning- it's 11.30am at Monument tube (Circle and District). We meet just outside the Fish Street Hill exit. It cost £7 and you pay in cash to the guide. It's a fantastic experience and you will learn loads and loads. I'll be there and looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible...

The webpage for 'London Walks' who organise the guided tour is here:

http://www.walks.com/Homepage/default.aspx

The Rules of Film Noir

Below is a link to a really good documentary on film noir that was broadcast last year on BBC4. It is available for you to download and watch on campus through B0B. Just click on the link and search for 'Rules of Film Noir'. The programme also features author George Pelecanos (see module booklet) as one of the noir experts:
https://bob.roehampton.ac.uk/index.php

Also, check out this interesting interview with the maker of documentary, Matthew Sweet:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/6056395/Why-the-recession-will-lead-to-a-renaissance-in-film-noir.html

For those who are going to write their essay on film noir or for those who are simply interested there is the film noir series on monday mornings starting in a couple of weeks time (I gave out a leaflet about this yesterday). Lastly, I've also been in informed that one of the films I will be showing in the series- The Third Man- which depects post-war Vienna is also available on BoB.

Multi-media project work begins today...

Today's session is really important as you'll be getting into your groups for the first time and deciding on topics for the multi-media project assessment.

Force of Evil

“You're wide open, Joe. I can see into you without looking.”

I hope you enjoyed or at the very least found interesting the film noir that we watched on Monday. Force of Evil is a well-respected example of the genre from 1948, set in New York City and directed by Abraham Polonsky. It is worth noting that both Polonsky and the lead John Garfield (Joe Morse) were investigated by HUAC during the communist scare of the late 1940s/ early 1950s and were eventually blacklisted, or prevented from working on Hollywood movies.

I should say however that it is not necessarily easy to watch films noirs- the acting may seem wooden, the plots too complicated, the atmosphere too oppressive or the soundtrack too jarring. However, it is a rewarding process if you persevere and you soon realise just how much of modern cinema owes to the film noir. You’ll get another chance to watch some noir on Monday when we look at some classic scenes from Jules Dassin’s (1948) Naked City.

Many of themes that I spoke about in the lecture are apparent in Force of Evil. I will pick out just a few here. First, the film was undoubtedly concerned with psychological states. Joe Morse, the key protagonist, was portrayed as a highly confident man with a conflicted conscience- torn between making ‘his first million’ and looking after his brother Leo who ran a small numbers bank in the slums (most probably the Lower East Side of Manhattan) where they grew up. Joe was principled in the sense that he didn’t want his brother to go under when the numbers came in, yet he would not let this stop him from pursuing his own greed. As the plot unwound, we also saw Joe become more paranoid- the scene where the wiretap on his phone is revealed by the clicking as he lifts the receiver is a good example of this. Joe spirals into despair at the end of the film when he realises that his actions and caused the death of his brother. He walks down the stairs to the river bank, where he feels like he has reached ‘the bottom of the world’.

Second, the film fits neatly into the left-wing style of film noir that I mentioned in the lecture. Force of Evil offers a critique of capitalism and the greed and selfishness that this economic system engenders. Indeed it is possible to suggest that Joe, his brother Leo or Doris are not ‘guilty’ or morally reprehensible for working in the illegal numbers racket, they are simply doing what they have to do in order to get by in an unfair system. This is an amoral city, in an immoral system. Leo attempts to be principled by refusing Joe’s offer to work in one of the soon to be legalised betting offices. However, the film shows that principles have no place in capitalism when the humble and honourable Leo eventually ends up dead, having been drawn into the gang dispute. There is also a revealing line earlier in the film where Joe explains that ‘money has no smell’, implying that there is no such thing as ‘dirty money’, or that all money is dirty in some respect. In terms of crime, Force of Evil is fairly typical of films noirs in the sense that it focuses on organised crime. In this film, the underworld of organised crime is shown to be woven intricately into the legal, or respectable world. Indeed, Joe Morse is himself a successful lawyer, albeit a crooked one working for a gangster who runs a numbers game. The message is that organised crime is part of the fabric of ‘ordinary’ capitalism, and that the system could not function without illegal trades and rackets- again, money has no smell.


Third, the city in Force of Evil is shown to be a trap, or a labyrinth. The main spaces of the city are the downtown offices, nightclubs and bars and the slum district where Leo runs his numbers bank and where he and Joe grew up. It is implied to us that Joe has left the ‘old’ neighbourhood- moving up in world, no doubt, - and rarely returns. Yet, during the film, Joe is drawn back to the tenements a number of times, trying to persuade his brother to accept his offer of ‘legitimate’ employment in a big office. Even if Joe feels as if he has left his roots in the poorer part of the city behind he cannot escape them. In fact, it is his self-interested ‘concern’ for his brother that eventually ruins him. A revealing scene, I feel, come close to the end when Joe is seen drowning his sorrows in a jazz bar accompanied by Doris. Doris, who cannot decide whether to fall for the cocky yet vulnerable Joe, is imploring Joe to ‘find an escape’ and to get out of the trap set by the city (which itself is a reflection of the psychic conflict that he is experiencing). Escape from his self therefore also entails an escape from the city, with its traps, cons, entanglements and sentimental lures. Doris appears finally willing to help Joe, yet the news of his brother’s death sends Joe down a final dead end. At the end of the film, Joe is pictured looking up from beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, the bridge perhaps symbolising, at last, a way out of the corrupt city- a force of evil indeed.

The Paris Commune 1871 (part 3)

Yet after only a week, the commune came under attack by some elements of the French army, which was being reorganised and reinforced rapidly by the government at Versailles. At the start of April the National Guard began fighting regularly with the regular French army. Throughout April and May the guard were pushed back and on May 21 the Versaillese troops began the reconquest of the city, from the wealth districts of the West. There was no big defence plan. Rather each local district, or quartier, fought desperately for survival. This was made easier of course by Haussmann’s destruction of the tangle of narrow streets and widening of the boulevards. They also had greater numbers and a centralised command from Versailles. Government troops slaughtered the National Guard. There was a ‘bloody week’ of fighting at barricades and the toughest resistance came from the east of the city. According to legend the last barricade was at Rue Ramponeau in Belleville (ironically now a gentrified district).

The number of communards slaughtered during the bloody week of fighting is hard to ascertain although some estimate the number may be close to 50,000. Tens of thousands more were imprisoned at Versailles for supporting the commune. The living dialectic of control and resistance can be extremely violent.

Human nature shrinks in horror from the deeds that have been done in Paris. The crimes of the insurgents have surpassed the most gloomy forebdings of what would be accomplished under the Red Flag. The burning of paris was diabolical; the shooting of the hostages ‘a deed without a name’. But it seems as if we were destined to forget the work of these maddened savages in the spectacle of the vengeance wreaked upon them. The wholesale executions inflicted by the Versailles soldiery, the triumph, the glee, the ribaldry of the ‘party of Order’, sicken the soul. (The Times, 1 June 1871)

Socialists and communists continue to revere the Paris Commune. Lenin and Marx described it as a living example of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. At Lenin’s funeral his body was even wrapped in the remains of a red and white flag preserved from the commune. Urbanists tend to view the commune as an example of how cities can perform an emancipatory function, they can be forces of dynamic processes, the site where the possible can be realised. Government’s, the police and business community are more to think about how such events can be prevented in the future.

The Paris Commune 1871 (part 2)

Part 2 of the lecture on the Paris Commune is below. This part deals with the National Guard and the establishment of the commune. Part 3 follows monday...

Many ordinary Parisians objected to the Prussian presence in the city and joined an armed militia known as the ‘National Guard’ who saw it as their duty, in light of government’s capitulation, to defend their city. Units of the guard, usually situated in the poorest districts of the city, elected their own leaders who included many radical and socialist leaders. Thus, the increasingly organised working class population of Paris was defiant in the face of France’s defeat and were prepared to fight if the German army provoked them. A further factor was the vacuum in power in the city caused by the move of France’s national assembly from Bordeaux to Versailles, just outside Paris. The government, in its chaotic state, was concerned that the National Guard had so many weapons at their dispersal and also a growing authority within the city itself. They ordered French soldiers to seize weapons and according to soem commentators they were also ordered to fire at a crowd of the National Guard and civilians. Yet the soldiers were too demoralised to carry out these orders and one by one many army units joined the popular rebellion. In a state of panic, the government then ordered an evacuation of the city by all remaining forces, by Police and by administrators of every kind. Effectively the central committee of the National Guard was now the new government in Paris. It hastily arranged elections and formally established a government on 26 March 1871. During the uprising Haussmann ruefully regretted that he had not been able to complete all his renovations, especially those in the East of the city, in time to prevent the revolt.

The new commune, as it became known, discarded the tricolore flag replacing it with a socialist red flag. It also introduced a number of policies such as the separation of church and state (forbidding the teaching of religion in schools), the abolition of night work in bakeries and the right of employees to take over and run and enterprise if had been deserted by its owner. Many districts also implemented their own projects such as the IIIe, which provided school materials for free and established an orphanage. There were also feminist inspired policies to disregard the distinction between married women and concubines and between legitimate and illegitimate children. They also advocated the abolition of prostitution and the closure of official brothels.

Two and half hours of 'Crime, Culture and the City' music now on Spotify

Just to remind you that there is some music that fits the themes, cities and time periods covered in the module available for you on 'spotify'. You can click on the link below:

http://open.spotify.com/user/nzamba/playlist/0WwE4l4GinTfbfPTtFIeMm

The Paris Commune 1871 (part 1)

As promised, here is something on the Paris Commune, a topic that I talked about only very briefly in the lecture. I'm posting this in sections so that it is easier to digest...

Part One deals with the background and context, including Baron Haussmann.

There is an awful lot we could say about the Paris commune, we could run a whole module on this in fact. However we will deal with it briefly here, whilst also placing it suitably in context. In short, the Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 28 to May 28, 1871. Principally, it was a government comprised of workers and their representatives, who demanded that Paris should be self-governing with its own elected council. This famous episode in history which lasted two months was bitter and eventually bloody, highlights once more and in a more graphic manner the ongoing dialectic of control and resistance that has characterised the modern metropolis.

The popular uprising in working class arrondisements that led to the commune was not supposed to happen. This was because between 1852 and 1870 Baron Haussmann had reconstructed Paris under the instruction of Napoleon III. Haussmann’s planning was influenced by many factors, not least was Paris’ history of street revolutions. There was also a concern, as was the case in London, with overcrowding, filth and disease in poor areas of city. Much of the concern was brought on by the 1832 cholera epidemic, which claimed the lives of 20,000 Parisians. It was believed that to prevent disease, ‘men and air should circulate’. As such the renovations were based upon the expropriation and clearance of the very worst districts which wide sweeping boulevards built in the place. These new roads were also claimed to enable public authority and to control a capital that had overthrown several regimes since 1789. The new large straight avenues helped to manoeuvre troops. Haussmann never hesitated to explain that his street plan would ease the maintenance of public order. Haussmann’s projects were funded by the French banks but controlled and managed by the state.

Critics pointed to the social rupture caused by the renovation of many working class districts. The city centre improvements prompted a rise in rents and forced poorer families towards the cities outer arrondissements. Thus the population decreased in the centre and grew in the more peripheral districts. There was also an imbalance, in line perhaps with London, between a new and wealthy West and a poorer, underprivileged and relatively untouched East. Alistair Horne (2007) writes that far from piercing the main trouble centres of the city, by neglecting some areas he produced a resentful apartheid, with infinitely more dangerous proletarian ‘red’ spaces such as the arrondissements of Belleville and Menilmontant. Greater concentration of the poor made self-organisation and self-determination easier- as the commune demonstrated.

This forms part of the context for the Paris commune. The other key aspect was the Franco-Prussian war. Prussia was a German Empire that eventually defeated France in a 10-month war leading up to the commune. Paris itself was under siege by 1870 and the gap between the rich and poor in the city had widened. In addition, the demoralization caused by the occupation of the city and subsequent armistice as well as food shortages caused widespread discontent amongst the impoverished working class in Paris.

Part 2 tomorrow follows the role of the National Guard.