David Mangin's aim in this book is to describe the hidden mechanisms behind the emergence of fragmented carpet metropolises in France. While conceding that the new forms of suburbanization have been written about before, he claims that they have seldom been examined in detail and that judgements about them have been too non-committal (read: too objective).

Mangin begins by posing the question of historical guilt: who were the prime movers behind the still-proliferating suburbs based on the single-family home and car-ownership that are blurring the familiar boundaries between centre and periphery, town and countryside? For this hankerer after harmonious beauty, the origins of 'home zones' and similar structures lie with Anglo-Saxon urbanists like Clarence Perry and Henry Wright and with Le Corbusier, after which their ideas were picked up by commercial forces and spread freely throughout the world.

Today, too, in Mangin'sview, liberalism in general and the United States in partic- ular are responsible for the rampant forms of the spontaneous postmodern city. The driving forces behind this North American 'colonization', which is also determining the French urban landscape, are identified as the media, advertising and the commercial symbols of MacDonald's and Ikea. They have usurped the role of the state in the once public, now commercialized, space that is held visually hostage by brand names that have turned the urban landscape into a 'brand landscape'.

Only a powerful French state is capable of calling a halt to the US-led globalized economy and the resulting privatization of urban space. Mangin wants the big brand names banned from the city which must at the same time be turned into a 'ville passante' by making the semi-private home zones through roads once more.

According to the author, about whose political sympathies there is never any doubt, today's neoliberal, monotonous cities should make way for the concentrated city of 'libertaire socialisme' in which residents would once again live in fraternal harmony in apartment blocks and travel by public transport.

The hilarious high point of the book is a chapter entitled 'Is America the guilty one?' in which Mangin states that 'the average American... and the model family ... were fabricated by social engineers in the United States at the beginning of the last century using mathematical, psychological and sociological discoveries'.

News about the postmodern city, in which this nostalgic Parisian - who defeated Koolhaas, Nouvel and MVRDV in the competition to refurbish Les Halles - can discover nothing good, is not forthcoming in La ville franchisee. But this piece of research, which was financed by the ministry of culture and other high-level government bodies, does provide a fascinating insight into the dominant opinions in contemporary French politico-intellectual circles where this sort of anti-rationalistic obscurantist battle against the free market and the United States is still being waged - something that everywhere else is regarded as a rearguard action.

All in all Mangin places himself firmly in a particular French architectural tradition, that of the 'grands gestes', which in the 1960s, with sweeping disdain for the individual, was responsible for designing all those wretched high-rise districts around French cities. But on these pure French state products, these bleak 'grands ensembles', the author is singularly silent.

© Steven Wassenaar