1 – Urban sprawl and transport infrastructure development

7The development of transport infrastructures to accompany the expansion of the Paris agglomeration proceeded at a variable pace (Merlin, 1997). To study this process, we classified the municipalities in the region and the arrondissements of Paris [4] by level of accessibility, as defined by the availability of transport services and infrastructure. This breakdown differs from the administrative divisions habitually used (Paris, inner suburbs, outer suburbs). It defines a relative position in the region at a given moment, but which is liable to change over time: a municipality may be considered as peripheral at the start of the century but become increasingly central due to urban expansion, suburban densification, and transport network development. These levels of accessibility can then be matched against data from censuses and life-event history surveys.

8To determine these levels of accessibility, we retraced the development of the region’s major transport networks over the 20th century—underground network (métro), regional express commuter network (RER), rail network (Société nationale des chemins de fer français [SNCF]), and major roads (motorways and expressways). [5] Using open-access geodata (available on the websites of the Atelier parisien d’urbanisme and the Institut d’aménagement et d’urbanisme), we documented their dates of opening (and closure in some cases) using different sources. [6] For each year between 1900 and 2001, we drew up an inventory of the services available in the Paris region municipalities and the Parisian arrondissements for each type of transport. [7] Based on this information, municipalities were divided into eight categories according to the frequency and speed of services on each network (Figure 1): dense underground (two or more stations per hectare and easy access to the other networks); less dense underground with RER; less dense underground without RER; RER without underground; railway and expressways; railway without expressways; expressways without railway; no transport network.

9As Merlin (1997) observed, infrastructure development took place in several stages. In the early 20th century, the underground developed inside Paris, providing a dense transport network for inhabitants of the city. The Paris suburbs, still sparsely populated, were structured by the presence of industrial activities close to the rail network. The interwar period marked a turning point, with the growth of suburban residential districts that were poorly served by the transport network, and with infrastructure development in general (Faure, 1991; Fourcaut, 2000).

10Following the Second World War and the housing crisis in Paris, the suburbs became more densely urbanized beginning in the mid-1950s, with the construction of high-rise developments on unoccupied land. From the 1950s and 1960s, a growing network of motorways provided new transport links to certain peripheral municipalities and improved the accessibility of those located along radial axes already served by the rail network.

11The 1965 urban development plan for the Paris region (Schéma directeur d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région de Paris) marked a shift towards polycentric development of the agglomeration, with the construction of new towns [8] in tandem with the development of the RER and of urban motorways serving the suburbs. This phase began in the 1970s and continued to the end of the century. In parallel, periurbanization received new impetus following the 1977 housing finance reform designed to improve access to home ownership for low-income households. From the late 1960s, transport networks in the Paris region underwent two major developments: first, the progressive opening of the RER lines from the early 1970s to the 1990s, their connection with the underground lines, and the concomitant extension of the underground into the inner suburbs; and second, the development of the national and regional motorway network (along radial axes and in concentric circles around Paris, respectively).

12The first major development gave rise to two new types of accessibility: ‘RER without underground’ and ‘less dense underground with RER’ (Figure 1A). In 2000, more than half of the Paris region population lived in municipalities belonging to one of these categories. Despite the acceleration of urban sprawl, this change marked a general improvement in residential accessibility for the region’s inhabitants. Occurring over a period when the Paris agglomeration population increased by two million (natural growth and in-migration), these changes led to a population redistribution towards the suburbs.

Figure 1A

Transport infrastructures of Paris region municipalities in 1940, 1970, and 2000

Transport infrastructures of Paris region municipalities in 1940, 1970, and 2000

2 – Accessibility of places of residence across cohorts

13These developments in housing and transport provision took place throughout the lifetimes of the cohorts born in the 20th century. Improved access to the city broadened the residential choices open to households and modified their living environment, even for those who did not move. Contextual, political, economic, and macrosocial transformations were additional factors in the different cohorts’ residential choices and aspirations. The aim here is to analyse the changes in transport provision and their effect on the geographical trajectories of cohorts born between 1911 and 1950.

14Recorded on the scale of municipalities and Parisian arrondissements, the respondents’ trajectories can be analysed in terms of the accessibility of their successive municipalities of residence. [9] The study is limited to trajectories between ages 20 and 50, an age span that minimizes both right censoring (start of the independent residential trajectory) and left censoring (age of the youngest respondents) for all three surveys. The study cohorts were chosen to isolate meaningful cohort groups, taking account of the context at the time of family formation when couples are seeking residential stability: the 1911–1925 cohorts (3B), the 1926–1935 cohorts (PDP), and last, the 1936–1945 and 1946–1950 cohorts (BE).

Figure 1B

Accessibility of municipalities of residence in the Paris region by age and by cohort

Accessibility of municipalities of residence in the Paris region by age and by cohort

Note: The dotted vertical line indicates approximately the year 1970. It is used as a reference to place the trajectories of the various birth cohorts in their respective contexts. The year 1970 was chosen because it corresponds to the first urban development policies at the regional level and the opening of the RER commuter lines.
Coverage: At each age, only respondents present in the Paris region are considered.

15For each cohort, the chronograms in Figure 1B give the proportion of individuals living in each accessibility category by age between 20 and 50. The breakdown by cohort reveals a diversification of the accessibility categories of respondents’ places of residence across cohorts and reflects the prevailing contexts. Over their lifelong geographical trajectories, the oldest cohorts (1911–1925) were divided between one half who lived close to an underground station and the other half who lived close to a railway station in what was then the suburbs. After the war, however, more frequent settlement in the most central arrondissements and municipalities (with dense metro access) can be partly explained by the arrival of young migrants from the provinces or abroad.

16It was in the 1926–1935 cohorts that the largest proportion of households left the most accessible districts. The post-war housing shortage (Chombart de Lauwe, 1952) obliged many young people setting up home to move into the suburban housing estates and high-rise developments that were mushrooming in the peripheral municipalities served by the rail network.

17The RER and the ‘new towns’ arrived at distinct moments in the lives of the different cohorts. The RER came into service when the baby boomers were having children, enabling many of them to move to newly accessible suburban municipalities. The rapid increase in the share of individuals aged 30–35 living in municipalities served by the RER was linked not only to new housing developments in the new towns but also to the housing finance reform of 1977. [10] Thanks to the RER, it became easier for the 1936–1945 cohorts to find suitably sized homes for their families or to commute to work with greater speed and comfort. The RER had little impact on the trajectories of older cohorts, often already settled in Paris or its suburbs.

18For all these cohorts, particular moments in the life course are affected by contextual changes such as marriage, family formation, or arrival in Paris for those migrating from elsewhere. While a large share of the cohorts born in the early 20th century migrated to the Paris region, not all cohorts were affected to the same degree by the housing crisis that ensued. Likewise, the different cohorts did not all benefit simultaneously from access to housing loans from the 1950s, mass housing construction in the 1960s, the construction of the RER, or the 1977 reform. Moreover, each cohort was marked by a specific economic and political context (belle époque, interwar period, post-war boom, etc.). They also witnessed periods of major structural change in the job market, including women’s mass entry into the labour force and the shift from manufacturing to services. The successive cohorts thus lived in different contexts, not only in terms of transport and housing, but also with regard to housing support policies and the rapidly evolving production system, whose impact on social and spatial mobility may have differed according to each household’s position in the social hierarchy.

1 – The decline of the ‘working-class’ in Paris after the 1960s despite households’ strategies of resistance

26The working-class presence in the most central districts of the agglomeration decreased during the second half of the 20th century as a combined result of several factors (Figure 2), notably changes in the occupational structure which reduced the relative share of manual and clerical/sales workers in the population (Chauvel, 1998), and departures from Paris intra-muros from the 1960s onwards, especially among the cohorts born after 1926. Placed in context, these trajectories can be explained both the decreasing availability of affordable dwellings inside Paris as the city started renovating its rundown neighbourhoods and, conversely, the increasing availability of social housing in suburban high-rise developments often built to accommodate manual workers. Paule’s trajectory is a typical example. Born in 1950 and abandoned at birth, Paule spent her teenage years in a children’s home run by the departmental health and social services (Direction départementale des affaires sanitaires et sociales [DDASS]) in Paris. [13] She would have liked to stay in Paris after getting married, but the couple had no choice but to accept an HLM apartment offered by the Peugeot company in Poissy (an industrial suburb 30 km north-west of Paris) where her husband worked as a mechanic. Classed in the stable working-class category (Paule has a lower-secondary florist’s diploma), they found refuge in social housing outside Paris when their children were born (Figure 2, fourth column, first row).

27In parallel with this movement to the suburbs, much of the working-class population in Paris intra-muros born after 1940 stayed put, thanks mainly to the existence of social housing which allowed manual-worker households to remain in the capital. Serge’s story is a remarkable example of both social and residential mobility. ‘I was born in the neighbourhood, I went to school in the neighbourhood, I met my wife in the neighbourhood…She was born here too. So, there you are, we’ve never been apart.’ Born in 1942, Serge worked at a printer’s, then in the banking sector, and has practically always lived in the same HLM apartment block in the 20th arrondissement, a working-class district of eastern Paris. His parents had moved into a newly built HLM housing project on the boulevards des Maréchaux in 1934. [14] His father, a building worker and then a shopkeeper, died when Serge was 16, leaving him alone with his mother in the apartment, his four sisters having already moved out. When he married the neighbours’ daughter, whom he had met at nursery school, his mother left them her own apartment, which was too large for her alone. Three years later, after the birth of Serge’s two children, his parents-in-law retired and left their four-room apartment to the young couple. Serge and his family are living there to this day. Serge and his wife were thus able to stay in their neighbourhood and move into a larger apartment as their family grew, simply by replacing the previous generation. ‘You just had to change the name on the rental contract.’ But it was also the result of a choice, that of staying in social housing to remain in the neighbourhood where they were born. ‘A long time ago, if we’d wanted a house, we would have bought a house. But I didn’t want to leave Paris. I didn’t want to leave my neighbourhood. I didn’t want to buy.’

28The role of family networks in obtaining social housing or a rent-controlled apartment under the 1948 law is mentioned in numerous interviews. Parents, uncles, aunts, and colleagues are all solicited, and complex strategies are deployed to obtain and keep a dwelling (Loiseau and Bonvalet, 2005). Affordable rents for social housing or 1948 homes, lower than those charged in the private rental sector, have enabled tenants who would otherwise be excluded for reasons of cost to stay in centrally located upmarket districts of Paris. Given the facilities at their disposal and the comfortable lifestyle in these old central districts, they preferred to give up the chance to buy rather than ‘go into suburban exile’.

2 – Continued upper-middle-class presence in central districts across cohorts

29The continued presence of the socially reproduced upper-middle classes in the most accessible areas from one generation to the next is associated with a relative increase in their share in the populations of these areas. In the older cohorts, the socially reproduced upper-middle classes, like other social classes, were forced to move to the suburbs due to the post-war housing shortage. However, in the younger cohorts, this is the only social class among whom a large proportion has the means to live in central districts of Paris. This continued presence is not linked solely to personal wealth but above all to family assets and/or networks, particularly when the family is Parisian. Urban renovation policies and the expansion of the underground to cover largely working-class districts have contributed to the attractiveness of Paris and made it even more desirable to continue living in the city. Homeowners in the different cohorts have benefited from rising property values and an improved living environment thanks to these rehabilitation policies and to the arrival of public transport in formerly isolated Parisian districts. The set of advantages of living close to the vast array of Parisian amenities is another argument for staying in the city, even if it means staying in the rental sector.

30The residential trajectory of Michèle, manager of a home furnishings store, born after the war into a bourgeois family from Grenoble (a medium-sized city in south-eastern France) is an example of the socially reproduced upper-middle classes. After graduating from Sciences Po in Grenoble, she accomplished her dream of ‘coming to Paris and living in Paris, that was my absolute objective.’ She then spent 3 years in the heart of the Parisian student quarter, in an apartment on the quai Saint-Michel found via a bridge-playing friend of one of her great-aunts. These were very happy years when, like many other young people of her generation, she ‘discovered new freedom’. She then married a high-ranking civil servant, and together they were able to buy a home, but in the less upmarket 12th arrondissement of south-eastern Paris:

31

I didn’t like the neighbourhood at all. It was very working-class and far from anywhere. I wasn’t used to living far from the centre, far from my job. I worked in Neuilly [an affluent municipality in the western inner suburbs]; it was awful!

32She nonetheless stayed there until she divorced in 1978, after the birth of her son. Without the personal means to buy a flat in a district she liked, she rented an apartment in the 9th arrondissement, close to an underground line that took her directly to her place of work. But with just one bedroom for herself and her son, the apartment soon became too small. She moved out after 3 years because she did not think much of the local schools. A cousin suggested she move into a vacant apartment in her building. Her new neighbourhood on the rue Saint-Martin in the central 4th arrondissement was exactly to her liking: a pedestrianized street, a top-floor apartment with a terrace, an old district with many shops, and located close to her work.

33While Michèle knew she could not afford to buy a property in central Paris, she exploited all the opportunities offered by successive laws promoting buyto-let investment:

34

I’m not a property owner at heart. I have the instincts of one, when it comes to investment schemes supported by the government—the Besson laws and so on, Méhaignerie or whatever, Périssol. [15] I’ve done all that, but I prefer to put tenants in these places because they’re usually in districts I don’t like, given my income.

35As this example confirms, not only owners seek to optimize their investments. Some tenants, like Michèle, weigh the advantages and drawbacks of ownership versus rental and rationally choose to remain in the private rental sector and invest in property elsewhere. And while property ownership has never been a status symbol for Michèle, her choices bear the traces of a traditional preference for rental among the French urban bourgeoisie (Daumard, 1996), but also the effects of family transmission, since her parents never bought their home in Grenoble.

3 – Upward mobility as a driver of suburban settlement in the 1960s

36The gentrification of Paris from the 1960s accelerated as the working- and middle-class cohorts born in 1926–1935 moved to the suburbs (Figure 2). It was the upwardly mobile classes whose numbers fell most sharply in the most accessible areas and, conversely, increased most strongly in the municipalities served by the rail network. This movement (from central areas to the suburbs accessible by train) was massive; around 10% of the 1926–1935 cohort followed this type of trajectory (Le Roux et al., 2017). Upward mobility was expressed in the desire to buy a house, even if this meant moving to a suburb with poor transport links and accepting a radical change in lifestyle. The case of Yolande in the 1926–1935 cohort, classed in the upwardly mobile upper-middle-class category (Figure 2), illustrates this link between upward social mobility and homeownership.

37Yolande was born in Lorraine in 1935 and spent her childhood between her mother, who left her father to live in Paris when she was 2 years old, her aunt, and a boarding school where she was placed at age 5. When she was 15, she went to live with her mother in a boarding house where she met her future husband. Although he got a job as an RATP ticket collector [16] through his brother, the couple could not afford to rent in the private sector and stayed on in the boarding house after their daughter was born in 1955. One year later, Yolande found a position as a caretaker and moved with her husband into a caretaker’s lodge in the 15th arrondissement, where they stayed for two and a half years. ‘And as we didn’t really know what to do, we said to ourselves, “Why not be caretakers?” No jobs were below us.’

38In 1959, they moved into a comfortable 33-m² apartment in the building, offered to them by friends moving to the provinces. Over the next 10 years, Yolande’s husband started taking evening classes while continuing to work at the RATP. He was promoted to ticket inspector, and Yolande found a job as a chemist’s assistant via a friend. Their income was now large enough to think about buying a place to live.

39Thanks to their accumulated savings and a mortgage guarantee provided by the RATP, their dream came true in 1969 when they bought a 72-m² apartment in Savigny-sur-Orge (a suburban municipality 19 km from Paris served by the rail network). For Yolande, who had always lived in the capital, the decision to leave Paris was difficult, especially because she did not drive:

40

At that time, I worked in Fresnes [a municipality 12 km south of central Paris], and the means of transport from suburb to suburb was pretty awful. So it took me an hour and a half to get home… and it was a really empty place, where I was scared stiff in winter, so I said to my husband, ‘I don’t think much of it, but well, I’ll have to learn to drive. This won’t do.’

41Unlike Yolande, who adapted well to her new surroundings once she got her driver’s licence, her husband was unhappy in the new apartment and hated the lack of space and greenery. His career was advancing well at the RATP, and he jumped at the chance when a colleague told him about a house for sale on his street. The house turned out to be small (52 m²) and the garden narrow, so the couple soon started planning to move again. Five years later, having increased their savings capacity after the husband was promoted to general inspector, the couple bought a 92-m² house in Ollainville (a municipality 32 km south-west of Paris served by a major road) with a large garden (1,500 m²).

42At the end of the interview, Yolande acknowledged her husband’s upward mobility: ‘He leads the entire inspection service…Ah, he’s done really well for himself. Really, for someone with just a primary school certificate’. Yolande and her husband are both of working-class origin but now form part of the upper-middle classes. Their exceptional occupational trajectory has taken them on an upward residential trajectory, from a boarding house to homeownership via a caretaker’s lodge, a rented apartment, and a first acquisition. For Yolande, who spent her entire childhood in a boarding house and a boarding school, her house is the dream of a lifetime: ‘I feel happy in my home. In fact, now it’s really the…My dream has come true.’

4 – Arrival of the upwardly mobile working- and middle-class babyboom cohorts in the new towns and suburbs served by the RER

43The project to develop new towns in the Paris region was highly original in its ambition both to improve the housing conditions of suburban residents and to facilitate access to the centre of the agglomeration through the development of the RER express commuter lines. Construction began at a time when homeownership in the Paris region was expanding. [17] For many young first-time buyers, particularly those of the baby-boom generation, the new towns provided an opportunity to acquire a first house or apartment (Imbert, 2005).

44Géraldine, a nurse who belongs to the stable middle-class category of the 1946–1950 cohorts (Figure 2) spent most of her childhood in Boulogne-Billancourt and Châtillon (inner suburban municipalities to the south-west and south of Paris, respectively) before renting an apartment in Créteil (inner suburban municipality to the south-east of Paris) when she started living with her partner. In 1980, when she was 34, they moved with their two children into a new house in Noisiel (a municipality of the new town of Marne-la-Vallée, 20 km east of Paris) that they bought with a subsidized loan. She describes their installation in the new town as an upward residential move in terms of the living environment because she and her partner were looking for somewhere quiet, close to parks and woodland, and accessible:

45

Afterwards, we realized that living in the new town had an enormous advantage because the schools were just over the road…here the school is next door, the nursery school, oh! It’s great! They went to school and came home too on their own. Ah, not many people can do that! Here, we have all the advantages: living close to the RER, 20 minutes from Paris, the nursery and primary schools nearby, the secondary school nearby, the high school nearby…

46For Géraldine, who has always worked in the 11th arrondissement, her new life in Noisiel represented a major improvement over that in Créteil and even in Châtillon, which was not yet connected to the underground. With hindsight, she does not regret the early ‘pioneer’ years in Noisiel, from 1980 to 1983, before the RER station opened. She was working nights and went to work by car. At the time of the interview, access to amenities was still an important factor when she talked about her retirement plans. Considering all the advantages of Noisiel (theatre, cinema, swimming pool), her husband was even less inclined to move away than she was. By targeting the aspirations of middle-class baby boomers—easy access to local amenities, schools, cultural and sporting activities—the new towns have contributed to their spatial anchoring in these municipalities (Imbert, 2012). For Géraldine, access to amenities in Noisiel was better than in the municipalities of the inner suburbs where she had lived previously. This example illustrates how the baby-boom cohorts and their successors have benefited from the improved infrastructure resulting from the development of new towns.

5 – Certain working-class populations remain geographically isolated

47The last major phenomenon revealed in Figure 2 is the concentration of a non-negligible share of the working-class population in areas poorly served by public transport. Around 15% of Paris agglomeration inhabitants in the stable working-class category, whatever their age or birth cohort, are not connected to the rail network. Apart from a few exceptions, this concentration on the margins of the agglomeration is specific to the working classes, whose residential choices are constrained by the cost of land. This results in long commuting times into Paris, as revealed in several interviews. ‘We made the sacrifice of travelling time, but, well, we made a choice, didn’t we? From the start, we knew there was a transport problem,’ explains Annie (1947), born in the Loire department and a resident of Beaumont-sur-Oise in the north of the Paris region. She met her husband at a large company in her hometown, and the couple then decided to move to the Paris region. The husband, who was the first to leave, found a job, then a studio apartment in northern Paris after several months in a boarding house. This studio became their ‘first little nest’. After 6 months in a small one-bedroom apartment in Villeneuve-la-Garenne (a municipality 12 km north of Paris), which was dingy, dirty, and far from their place of work, they found a two-bedroom apartment in Montigny-les-Cormeilles (a municipality 30 km to the north-west of Paris, served by a motorway). They moved again to a three-bedroom apartment in the same neighbourhood when their second child was born. When the third child arrived, they started thinking about buying a home. ‘We were at the right age to buy.’

48After deciding to buy, they had to choose where to live and, above all, how much building land to buy. After visiting several places well served by trains from the Gare du Nord (the North Station in Paris), they opted for a 400-m² plot in a municipality on the edge of the Paris region. ‘We took what we could afford.’ The price to pay was 3 hours of daily commuting for her and 4 hours for her husband who works in Puteaux (a suburb adjoining the west of Paris) and the lack of any real town centre. ‘There’s not even a town centre; you can’t even call that the town centre. It’s the street for the station, and that’s about it.’

49Despite the high inflation of the 1970s, the monthly mortgage repayments remained a constant burden because both spouses had episodes of unemployment over a 10-year period. In this case, the couple achieved their ambition to own a house and a plot of land, but had to make major sacrifices.