In Remembrance of Things Past? Strategies of Public Pedagogy for Urban “Renovation”

In France, high-rise housing estates constructed in the postwar years have increasingly come to symbolize social dislocation and violence. This image arises both from the physical decay of the housing stock and increased social segregation in the estates. Since the 1980s some of the largest, most dilapidated, and most notorious structures have been demolished as part of urban regeneration projects (Donzelot 2006; Rosello 1997). The demolitions have been presented as signaling the sweeping away of an outmoded form of accommodation and the social ills associated with it. Of course the demolition of an iconic building provides, of itself, a bookend to the history it embodies; however, there are distinct political benefits to the staging of a funerary spectacle, which has as its audience both a displaced local population and a wider urban constituency. With an eye to the symbolism of such events, local authorities have provided occasions of civic remembrance, which seek to recast the high-rise housing estate as a social world worthy of recognition, but one whose time has irrevocably passed. Through the analysis of two examples of commemorative events, I wish to argue that cultural projects accompanying demolitions can be powerful tools of ‘‘public pedagogy’’ (Giroux 2000; Giroux and McLaren 1994). The form of public pedagogy examined here works through ceremonial acts of collection, (re)-organization, and restitution directed at relieving culpability for the ‘‘social problems’’ associated with France’s public housing estates. Foremost in the