The Pleasure of Living: Lessons from France for US Social Housing

In the decades after World War II, France and the US faced similar dilemmas: massive housing shortages, deep inequality, and pressure to build quickly and cheaply. In both contexts, large-scale public housing became a central tool of national modernization, and in both, many of the most ambitious projects later came to symbolize planning failure.

My keynote chapter on French architect Renée Gailhoustet, published in a new book, revisits this history, but through a different lens. Rather than treating social housing as a technocratic exercise in quantity and efficiency, Gailhoustet asked a deceptively simple question: can social housing offer good health—the pleasure of living or plaisir d’habiter she conceptualized—to the people who inhabit it? Her work, and the political context that made it possible, offer important lessons for the future of US social housing policy.

From the Projects to Lived Geographies

Postwar France responded to acute housing shortages with the construction of grands ensembles, the equivalent of US postwar public housing projects: vast, rapidly built housing estates on cheap land, some located in inner-city neighborhoods, others in peripheral suburbs. Backed by strong state intervention and new planning tools, these projects were hailed as rational, modern solutions to poverty and overcrowding. Within a few years, they housed hundreds of thousands of families, especially in the working-class banlieues around Paris. 

Over time, however, these estates came to be associated with physical decay, segregation, and uprisings. Policy shifted away from territorial investment and toward individual housing subsidies; demolition and “urban renewal” became the dominant response. 

Gailhoustet’s projects emerged as a quiet revolt against this standardization. Working in the “red belt” of communist-led suburbs around Paris, she designed housing that refuted the one-size-fits-all logic of other postwar projects. In one community, her master plan produced roughly 1,500 different apartment types out of 2,000 units. Difference was not a problem to be managed; it was the condition for flexibility, dignity, and health. 

She spoke of her housing as “potential geographies”: spaces intentionally left unfinished so residents could rearrange, add to, and adapt them over time. Terraces, gardens, external stairways, and pedestrian networks blurred the boundaries between private and collective life. Children playing, outdoor meals, the smell of barbecues, and ambitious roof gardens were not side effects; they were the point. 

The Paradox of a Radical Legacy

Today, some of Gailhoustet’s most remarkable projects, like La Maladrerie in Aubervilliers (pictured above), are in visible disrepair. Cracking concrete, water infiltration, and high energy bills expose residents to environmental health risks through no fault of their own. Underfunded housing authorities struggle to find the resources for comprehensive retrofits. Demolition scenarios once again loom. 

At the same time, her work is celebrated in museums and with awards, and newer architects draw directly from her approach: renovating existing postwar estates, adding gardens and balconies, expanding living space, and dramatically improving thermal comfort. Renovation, not demolition, becomes a path toward environmental health equity. 

This tension between neglect on the ground and admiration in professional circles should feel familiar to anyone watching the trajectory of public housing in the US. 

Lessons for American Social Housing Debates

What does Gailhoustet’s story offer to policy conversations about public and social housing in the US, from New York City Housing Authority campuses to the new social housing experiments in places like Montgomery County or the Vienna-inspired proposals in California?

1. Stop treating social housing residents as a problem to be relocated.
   French policy shifts in the 1970s and 2000s echo US programs like HOPE VI that have frequently displaced long-term residents. Gailhoustet’s work insists that peripheral neighborhoods are not “badlands” to be emptied but sites of political and social mobilization. Housing policy should begin from that premise.
2. Invest in transformation, not erasure.
   Faced with aging buildings, energy poverty, and deferred maintenance on a massive scale, the easy answer is demolition and mixed-income redevelopment. A healthier response would prioritize deep retrofits that improve indoor air quality, thermal comfort, and accessibility while preserving social networks and resident control. 
3. Design for difference and everyday life.
   Much US social housing, even when well-intentioned, still reproduces generic floorplans and limited communal space. Gailhoustet suggests another path: allow for varied unit layouts, semi-private outdoor spaces, and shared terraces or courtyards that support play, gardening, care work, and informal economies. Zoning, building codes, and financing structures should stop penalizing spatial experimentation. 
4. Link social housing to environmental health. 
   In both France and the US, low-income households are disproportionately exposed to noise, pollution, and extreme temperatures. Architecture and policy can address these inequalities by orienting buildings and courtyards to reduce heat stress, planting and maintaining tree canopies, insulating facades, and ensuring that retrofits target the worst-performing buildings first. Social housing is not just a shelter policy; it is a public and environmental health infrastructure. 
5. Center residents as stewards and co-authors.
   Gailhoustet imagined residents as active participants in shaping their homes and shared spaces. Public housing modernization in the US too often treats residents as stakeholders to be consulted at the margins. The future of social housing will depend on resident-led design and governance, from co-op conversions and community land trusts, to tenant councils with real power over maintenance, programming, and redevelopment decisions. 

Since the 1970s, the French architect had warned against the temptation to standardize housing forms to the point where many people can no longer find their place in them. Her warning resonates in an era when housing debates in the US often reduce homes to unit counts, financing stacks, and compliance checklists. The challenge ahead is not only to build more affordable units, but to insist that public and social housing can be places of joy, agency, and difference, where everyday life is supported rather than merely contained. If we take this seriously, we can move beyond a narrow focus on cost and risk toward a richer, more demanding standard: the right, for everyone, to experience with dignity the pleasure of living.

Photo: “La Maladrerie, Aubervilliers” by Jacqueline Poggi, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0