If there is one master narrative about the postwar European city, it is most likely that of the high hopes and ultimate failures of modern urbanism. This evolution has come to be understood as a logical consequence of its authoritarian denial of user needs. Caught up in rhetoric and critique, the history of this “banal modernism” has meanwhile remained remarkably overlooked. Focusing on French mass housing estates and new towns, this dissertation examines the development of modern urbanism and its mounting criticisms through the lens of what turns out to be a shared concern: the user.

Under the influence of an expanding welfare state and a rising consumer culture during France's postwar decades of unprecedented economic and urban growth, the user became an increasingly central question in the organization of everyday life. The study reveals how modern urbanism was shaped by and actively shaped this development, in which the user shifted from a standard, passive beneficiary of public services to an active participant and demanding consumer.

The dissertation argues that French urbanism evolved as an experimental process in which the realms of production and consumption were in continual interaction. Amongst the cultures of urban expertise, the domain of sociology became a central mediator in this process. Providing architects and planners with a unique entryway into the world of the user, it informed the design of new housing typologies and urban centers meant to entice users in novel ways.

Prevailing accounts tend to cast the postwar French city either as shaped by a degenerated version of interwar modernism or driven by the exigencies of a centralized state. This study develops an alternative focus: rather than architectural doctrine or government policy, it is the changing category of the user—fueled by the entanglement of social welfare and consumer culture—that underlies the polities of urban change in postwar France. By showing how expertise of the user traverses what have previously been understood as fundamentally opposing approaches to the city—modernist technocratic planning versus user participation—the study dismantles the notions of “top-down” and “bottom-up” that continue to shape urban debates today.