The street riots that swept through France in the fall of 2005 focused worldwide attention on the plight of the country's immigrants and their living conditions in the suburbs many of them call home. These high-density neighborhoods were constructed according to the principles of functionalist urbanism that were ascendant in the 1960s. Then, as now, the disparities between the planners' utopian visions and the experiences of the inhabitants raised concerns, generating a number of sociological studies of the "new towns." One of the most sophisticated and significant of these critiques is...
The street riots that swept through France in the fall of 2005 focused worldwide attention on the plight of the country's immigrants and their livi...