Une violence éminemment contemporaine
Jean-Pierre Garnier
Notice anglaise
An Eminently Contemporary Violence, Essays on the city, the intellectual middle class and the deletion of the lower classes
This synthesis of forty years’ observation of urban realities examines the changes wrought by a political form of town and city management that allows economic greed too much room, to the detriment of “the right to the city”. The often controversial ideas expressed here join the thread of historical and sociological continuity linking the so-called “murder of Paris” (as described by Louis Chevalier in the late seventies), the rise of a new lower middle class in the grip of the powers in place, and the deletion in political terms of the lower classes by means of the “urban crises” so often the subject of current media coverage.
“Crises in the suburbs”, “a housing crisis”, “homeless people” – all these are symptoms whose treatment in social terms (plus those of law and order these days) is destined to failure because the basic conflict of interests between most city-dwellers and users and property speculators has been ignored. This book reveals the way the multiple innovations aiming at the illusory belief that diametrically opposed interests can be magically reconciled, actually exercise a symbolic violence by simply repeating the very real one practised on the ever-growing number of citizens deprived of their cities.
Jean-Pierre Garnier does research on urban sociology at the CNRS, and teaches the same subject at a specialist School of Architecture. He has written several works on urban politics and the involution of the French intelligentsia, including Des barbares dans la cité [Barbarians in the Inner City] (Flammarion 1997) and La Pensée aveugle [Blind Thought] (Spengler, 1995).
Available: 17/0310 – Public Price 18 euros – 256 Pages – ISBN : 978–2–7489–0104–7