Saturday, January 7, 2012: 9:20 AM
Michigan Room B (Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers)
Minayo Nasiali, University of Arizona
In 1953, recently elected socialist Mayor Gaston Defferre wrote that the future of Marseille lay in its modernization: “The role of a mayor is to transform the city and adapt it to modern life…We must transform, modernize, and develop this city, to ameliorate the standards of living of our residents.”
[1] Defferre’s efforts were part of a comprehensive post World War Two plan to modernize France and establish a comprehensive welfare state. During this period, France was also working out the repercussions of decolonization as families from former French colonies in Africa and Asia migrated to the metropole. Municipal technocrats, central state planners, and ordinary people had to decide how migrant families fit into an emerging national vision for a modern France. As a port city on the Mediterranean, Marseille has been a key gateway between metropole and colony, and an important site for making sense of how post-1945 national debates about the meaning of citizenship and social welfare occurred within a larger imperial context.
Recent scholarship on post-World War Two urbanism has questioned the assumption that modernization was a primarily top down affair (Wakeman, 1997). This paper builds on these recent studies by examining how Marseille residents experienced, contested and participated in local modernization efforts. While scholarship on the experience of urbanization has focused on the formation of class solidarities, I will examine how residents understood their neighborhoods in terms of space, class, and ethnicity. I explore the interrelationship between imagining ethnicity and belonging to the neighborhood and argue that concepts of difference were integral to local understandings of social welfare. More specifically, notions of rootedness were a key way that residents from diverse ethnic backgrounds imagined who was from the neighborhood, and who deserved to be modern.
[1] Interview in Enterprise, 1953, Marseille Municipal Archives 100 II 416
