Housing or dwelling : space-times of high-rise living. Case studies in Romania (Braşov) and France (Lyon, La Duchère)

Contribution by

Bianca Botea 
Anthropologist, Assistant Professor at the University Lumière - Lyon 2 and Researcher at the Laboratory of Anthropology of Contemporary Issues (LADEC)

Olivia Legrip 
Postdoctoral fellow in Anthropology at LabEx COMOD (Université de Lyon) and affiliated to the Institut supérieur d’étude des religions et de la laïcité (ISERL)

Download original version in French at the end of the text

Spatial scales of high rise-living: the flat, the building, the neighbourhood and beyond

We all live in places, but we only inhabit some of them. Dwelling refers to the construction of a relationship of proximity and intimacy with an environment and in this sense, it is different from the simple fact of residing or housing (Paquot, 2007). Dwelling is based on the production of 'a familiar use of the world in which a sense of inhabiting (one's own doorstep, building, neighbourhood) is maintained, which crosses the threshold of the household and may concern, for example, certain public places in the city' (Breviglieri and Trom, 2013: 401).

In our survey on living in high places in the city of Braşov in Romania and in La Duchère in Lyon, we wondered whether our interlocutors were building a relationship of living with their building or neighbourhood, or whether they were simply residents of these places. More specifically, it is the question of the spatio-temporal scales of inhabitation that concerned us, since it is possible to live in a building, a neighbourhood, a city... and not to live in them. In the first part of this article, we will examine the scales of this spatial anchoring of inhabiting and then show that this dimension of spatial experience necessarily involves a relationship to time.

One way of approaching living is therefore to deal with the question of familiarity and the links (social, emotional, etc.) that individuals establish with their living environment.

In the various works carried out on verticality, some authors highlight a social distance observed in these buildings, while other authors show, on the contrary, that forms of proximity and sociability are not lacking in the life of these buildings (Ghosh 2014, Baxter, 2017, Bonneval and Gentil on this website). This proximity can even be very strong in some cases, as S. Ghosh's research in housing located in the outskirts of Toronto shows that there is a phenomenon of 'neighbourhood in height' at the scale of the building. The building becomes a microcosm, a city within a city, which provides the various functions of commerce, work, sociability, education, etc. for the Bangladeshi residents living there (Ibid.).

Christopher Harker (2013) highlights another interesting case, in the city of Ramallah, where social ties are not built on the vertical scale of the building since the residents of these buildings spend little time here. Nevertheless, important links are established through horizontal mobility, which takes place through the circulation networks of these residents between the city and the countryside (for supplies, for family reasons, etc.) through the use of shared taxis.

We explored this question of sociability in the high-rise buildings of our two case studies, in the cities of Braşov in Romania and Lyon (La Duchère) in France.

In the Civic Centre of Braşov, the profile of the residents of the high-rise buildings located on the main boulevard¹ tends to concern highly educated professional categories and/or with an above-average standard of living, which, according to our interlocutors seems to have had an impact on sociability and neighbourhood practices. According to them, this has led to fewer people getting to know each other within the building and to little participation in the neighbourhood (e.g. participation in co-ownership meetings).

I feel nostalgic about the neighbourhood where I used to live (Triaj). But it was more peripheral, a different social milieu. Here we have as neighbours doctors, university professors, office colleagues, former university colleagues... The relationship with the neighbours is very different, respectful relationships, we are not quarrelsome, but we are not socialised, we have not made friendships. That doesn't mean that we didn't ring each other's doorbells if we needed to. But before we had friends, simple, unpretentious people. In Triaj, if I needed an onion for the kitchen I would go to the neighbour's, here I wouldn't dare. So, with the neighbours, we only see each other if we meet by chance, otherwise not. (...) There are only less than 20% left of the original neighbours today the majority of people who live here are tenants (...)" (S.P². 62 years old, building K).

The residents of these buildings therefore live in their flats but not really in the building as they do not invest in the neighbourhood scale. However, a form of recognition and a feeling of collective belonging to a community of neighbours are experienced outside the neighbourhood, in places where people meet accidentally, for example at the church, at the bus stop opposite their building, at the market, etc.. In these public places, the neighbour becomes that 'familiar stranger' to quote Goffman, and we could say that the same is true of the neighbourhood.

However, there are exceptions to these forms of social distance in the building, especially within the sociability of the elderly or in connection with mutual aid practices with them. When mobility outside the building becomes problematic for them, two neighbours meet weekly and spend time in the closed balcony from where they can look out over the city and tell each other their stories.

Mrs. S. J.'s balcony, where the exchanges with her neighbour took place. ©Bianca Botea, 2017

The Mall construction site seen from her balcony. ©Bianca Botea, 2017

Our two interlocutors also receive visits from some of their neighbours on the landing for a one-off errand or to drink coffee and discuss the latest information on the progress of the Mall construction site and its effects (destruction of trees, changes to pavements and bus stops, etc.) or on current events at national level.

Unlike the high-rise buildings of the Braşov Civic Centre, where living is mainly on the scale of flats and the neighbourhood and less on the scale of neighbourhoods, in La Duchère the neighbourhood is not the scale of living for all the residents. The rather central position of the civic centre in the city, located in a space that is a hub for travel and a concentration of services (market, Mall, station, administrations, schools, etc.) explains why this neighbourhood scale is strongly invested in Braşov. This does not mean, however, that a peripheral position alone generates a relationship of residence rather than of living. To illustrate this, we will return to the example of the Duchère district.

The ethnography carried out in the Tour Panoramique and the Érables building shows precisely two types of relationship between the residents and their living space. On the one hand, a certain number of people from Duchère live in the district and rarely leave it. The vast majority of them have been living in La Duchère for several decades (some of them since it was built) or were born there. Historically, this was the dominant dimension. On the other hand, for others, La Duchère has the aspect of a "dormitory district", in which the residents do not live, do not consume, do not walk or work there. These residents do not consider themselves to be "Duchérois"; they have recently been living in a flat that they bought here for the view and the high floor, but not for the neighbourhood. They live in La Duchère, but actually live in the neighbouring communes: they have jobs in Lyon, and their children go to school in Champagne au Mont d'or or Ecully. This trend, which changes - or annihilates - the relationship with the district, emerges above all with a part of the new arrivals who often did not know the district before the urban renovation plan. However, this picture is not so homogeneous either, since some newcomers to the neighbourhood are involved in collective projects such as the shared gardens, in search of building links and putting down roots here.

Memory and the experience of time in high-rise living

The transition from the act of residing to the fact of living implies a relationship of familiarity and intimacy with space, in other words an experience that is expressed through a particular relationship to time and continuity. While height has been looked at in particular from the perspective of the spatial question - and especially by geographers before other social scientists - the temporal dimension has been less explored in the work on verticality.

Although the importance of the temporal dimension is mentioned in some of the work on this topic, it is not addressed explicitly and in a 'thick description' (Geertz, 1998).

Anne Raulin's work on the city of Manhattan (1997), among others, is an exception here, although it does not address the dimension of inhabitation that interests us here. This work provides an original reflection on the role played by the Manhattan skyline, by the abstract toponymies of the streets or by the topography, in the construction of a singularity of the city of New York, more precisely a paradoxical role of "anti-memory": "An anti-memory that has made it possible to contain the upwelling of the collective and historical past and has allowed the advent of the imagination, without any constraint towards the future. But an imagination that takes its liberties with the past, but without leaving it, breaks it down, decontextualises it, reinvents it as it pleases (e.g. the styles of houses, architecture, neighbourhoods, etc., all of which refer in a new way to this multicultural heritage, to a diversity of groups and influences). A collective imagination that subordinates memory and history, whereas in France it is annexed to them. (...)” and which 'allows not an eternal return to the same but an eternal return of the new' (Raulin, 1997: 221).

Closer to questions of inhabitation, other anthropological studies have addressed the memorial narratives of the inhabitants of social housing in the context of the demolition of the "Grands ensembles" (Morovich, 2014; Botea, 2014). These works highlight a discrepancy between the memorial issues envisaged in the context of urban renewal by the actors carrying out the urban project and the logics of habitation and attachment of the people (Botea, 2014)³. If the experience of time is a central dimension in the analysis of these works, as well as the question of urban change, less emphasis is placed here on an approach to verticality.

Other works that explicitly focus on living in heights, such as those by Richard Baxter (2017) and Loïc Bonneval and Aurélien Gentil, approach the historical dimension in the relationship to verticality from a different angle. Loïc Bonneval proposes an analysis of the evolution of the representations of height in luxury buildings in Lyon from the point of view of people's residential trajectories and their accounts of the experience of living in these buildings. As for Richard Baxter (2017), his research on living in high-rises also proposes to integrate a sensitive approach to understand this phenomenon, a more phenomenological approach centred on emotion and perception, but the question of memory and the experience of time are ultimately too little addressed in his work.

We wish to extend these various contributions in two ways. On the one hand, we will rely on an anthropological, sensitive and ecological approach to understand the experience of height, as well as on one of the representations of the residents of these buildings. A varied methodology has enabled us to carry out this type of exercise: observations and interviews in people's homes, the creation of commented itineraries by accompanying people on their daily journeys, sound recordings and 'on-board' videos (made by the people). This methodology allowed us to explore in greater depth elements that had been little explored in previous work, such as body memory in the relationship to height and the pragmatic dimension of sight. These tools have also made it possible to re-examine the question of the spatio-temporal anchoring of dwelling and to broaden these scales to better understand the experience of dwelling and its narratives. We will show that the practices of living in heights and its representations must be analysed in a spatial and historical perspective that goes beyond the experience of living in these buildings or in the city. The spatio-temporal anchorage is diffuse and extended in time and space, through the long memory of the inhabitants or their families.

Living in the place before you even live there

A first dimension that we wish to address here is linked to the importance of attachments and the feeling of familiarity with places, which determine the choice of places of residence. We will show that this feeling of 'presence' in places and this feeling of inhabiting are built even before actually living in these places. The relationship to height is also directly influenced by this past experience.

Marcel was a fireman at the Duchère fire station (since 1966), and in this context, he began to walk around the Tour Panoramique when it was only a building site. Indeed, when the workers were not occupying the façades, the firemen organised access exercises through the outer walls and abseiling, or, when the stairwells were available, sports training sessions were organised there. When Marcel and his wife retired in 1988, they had to leave their accommodation in the barracks and quickly decided to buy a large flat on the 24th floor of the Tower, with which they felt very familiar. Given his background, this inhabitant born in the 1920s becomes for the residents of the Tour Panoramique the memory of the neighbourhood and the building. The links with his neighbours in the Tower are all the stronger because he lives in a flat on a very high floor and for several years now, he and his wife, both in their nineties, have not been able to leave their home. The height amplifies the impression that the couple is locked up at the top of the Tower, but the solidarity of the neighbours compensates for this loss of autonomy and the feeling of isolation. We have already highlighted this aspect of peer support in high-rise buildings with the elderly in the case study of the Braşov Civic Centre.

The trajectory of Marcel and his wife is interesting in that it shows that these inhabitants already felt familiar with the Tower even before they lived there, through their experiences during interventions related to the fire station. Marcel was already experiencing the Tower before he lived there. In her study on La Duchère, Sarah Rojon (2014) noted a similar idea, when she highlighted the familiarity that 'new' arrivals in the neighbourhood already had with these places. The author shows that many of the 'new' arrivals in the neighbourhood (for home ownership and settlement in the new housing following urban renewal) are in part former inhabitants of the neighbourhood. They re-establish themselves in this neighbourhood which they know and have experienced, in an official dwelling in the fire station, or as a child in the family flat, as we will also see in the following example.

When height awakens the senses and the body's memory

Danielle arrived in La Duchère from Algeria with her parents and, as a teenager at the time, discovered France from a high floor of one of the Mille bars in the large La Duchère complex, a bar that has since been destroyed. Since her arrival, she has always lived in La Duchère. Through the interviews with her, we were able to understand how her relationship to the view and to height is conditioned by her Algerian and French residential trajectory. From the first family flat of her adolescence, she keeps the frustrated memory of a view obstructed by the Barre des Érables, which faced her and masked Lyon. As an adult, Danielle married Pierre and they bought a flat in Les Érables, in the same bar that had been so reviled by her family for years because it obstructed their view. The purchase of this flat gave Danielle the security of home ownership and the view. She tells me with a smile that decades later she is still amazed that she lives in this bar, which seemed as awkward as it was inaccessible when she was a teenager. This social upgrading is important to Danielle, especially since it was done without leaving the neighbourhood where she has always lived. Many residents of Les Érables mention as a major disadvantage of the living room balconies (facing Lyon) their exposure to the wind and the resulting problems of isolation due to the heat in summer. However, Danielle's story leads her to take the opposite position to her neighbours. She refuses to install double glazing and likes to feel the warm wind blowing into her living room day and night, whether the shutters are open or closed. In fact, she says that she feels sensations from her childhood and perceives again the warm wind that used to blow in the courtyard of the house where she lived in Algeria. The experience of height is part of a historical depth that takes Danielle back to before her arrival in La Duchère, when she did not live on a high floor. This feeling of height goes back to the starting point of her residential trajectory and awakens her bodily memory through the sensation of the warm wind.

When height recalls painful experiences of communism

In the case study in the city of Braşov, we were able to observe that the temporal scale is an important horizon to take into account when analysing the relationship to verticality. Here the height of the buildings is not necessarily valued because it often echoes bad memories of the communist period: memories of lifts that often broke down because of electricity failures, a common currency during the last decades, or of water that did not go up to the upper floors. In general, the so-called "communist" blocks, which were built during this regime and which represent the majority of housing construction, have a bad reputation. The current tendency of the population to move to new buildings in order to escape the 'communist blocks' is exploited by property developers who develop new districts, largely with high-rise residences. A good illustration here is the peripheral district "Avangarden". It should be noted, however, that even in these new districts, height is now less in demand by those who buy flats here, and developers are returning to the four-storey buildings they started with. Many problems of malfunctioning are reported by residents and are attributed to the large number of flats in the formula "many flats, many problems".

 

Avangarden neighbourhood, Braşov ©Bianca Botea, 2017

The lower regime of the buildings (4 floors) in the first construction phase of Avangarden.
©Bianca Botea, 2017

The lower regime of the buildings (4 floors) in the first construction phase of Avangarden.
©Bianca Botea, 2017

The view from above: a spatio-temporal approach

The importance of a spatio-temporal approach to living at height leads us to look at the question of view from this angle, which is an essential part of the work on verticality. Analyses concerning the relationship to the view have not dealt much with the temporal dimension. A few works underline the importance of this aspect. For example, according to Baxter (2017: 345), sight is an "embodied and multi-sensory experience" that calls upon the degree of knowledge and background of the residents. As Loïc Bonneval also shows (see his article on the website), knowledge and social and professional trajectories influence residents' ways of looking. According to the author, the view is informed by a "familiar, not to say educated, look at the landscape, and a spontaneous, immediate, and therefore less valued, reaction to the view".

Through our analyses in La Duchère and Braşov, we propose to extend this work by addressing other aspects of this temporal anchoring of the view, in particular the question of bodily memory. In another step, we will pay attention to another ubiquitous aspect in approaches to sight, the perspective of escapism and singularity often associated with discourses on elevated sight. If we have encountered this type of discourse in our interviews, we will show that the view from above does not only generate a feeling of escape, but it also has another, more pragmatic function, of connection to the rhythms (and temporalities) of the city and the neighbourhood.

Remembering a distant height

The practices of high-rise living are based on sensory and everyday dimensions, as we have just seen, but they are also part of residential trajectories and previous experiences of living in other cities and in contact with other verticalities.

For example, Monique arrived in Lyon in 2010 after spending several years in New York. She opted for a rental on the 7th floor of the Tour Panoramique. She had lived in Villeurbanne for 5 years in the 1980s but did not know La Duchère. She wanted to move to Paris, but her retirement did not allow her to do so, so she chose to return to Lyon. Chance led her to La Duchère. While still in New York, and in anticipation of her return to France, Monique joined a mailing list for expatriates and got in touch with the owner of the Tour Panoramique flat. On receiving the photographs, she decided to visit the flat quickly as she "fell in love with the angled openings", she says. At the foot of the Tower for the first time, she looked at it like the New York towers: "but it's tiny! 26 floors is not high... well... it's all relative"; she perceived it to be quite high but very narrow, not very posh. This image of the high city was transposed to La Duchère, because Monique lived on the first floor (in Queens and then in Brooklyn), as high floor rentals were too expensive in New York.

She said that she discovered burnt cars in the neighbourhood shortly after she moved in, which prompted her to contact the landlord to consider leaving because these events reminded her of the trauma of 11 September 2001, when she was living in New York and saw the World Trade Center towers collapse from the UN building where she worked. She associates the demolition of the Barre des Mille with the return of calm to the neighbourhood. Still referring to the New York skyline, Monique lists the illuminated vertical features that she observes at night: the Fourvière basilica, the Eiffel Tower, the Part-Dieu Tower and the Oxygen Tower, like "ersatz New York". During the day, she also looks through binoculars at the Alps and Mont Blanc, that "enormous iceberg". Monique's New York experience has structured her relationship with the Duchère district and with heights, through the lights of the city and the noise of urban works.

Double perspective of the elevated view: 'above ground' practices and anchoring in the city

It is first of all a feeling of escape, of being "out of the ordinary" and "out of the everyday", offered by the view from above that is described by our interlocutors from La Duchère. This feeling is amplified in the context of urban renewal with the arrival of low-rise buildings.

The new inhabitants of the Tour Panoramique and the Barre des Érables have diversified the Duchère, but only in terms of height, which is a specificity of these two buildings, which are also heritage buildings⁴. Otherwise, the new inhabitants of this district often settle in the new blocks, which have a maximum of 6 floors. It is interesting to note that this variation in the height regime of the buildings reinforced with the urban renewal increases the feeling of difference between these ways of living - in high buildings and in the new blocks of lower construction - and amplifies the feeling of height by this comparison.

The Tour Panoramique in low angle and The New Blocks from an elevated flat in the tower. ©0livia Legrip, 2019

These feelings of isolation from the ground (and therefore from the neighbourhood) are put forward by the inhabitants through a staging of the view and the landscape. With the height, they no longer "touch the ground" (and here again stand out from the Duchère district, which is firmly rooted on the ground floor), they feel "on a cloud", have "the feeling of flying", of being "suspended". One autumn day, when Monique, a resident of the 7th floor of the Tour Panoramique, opened her shutters, she was confronted with a wall of fog that completely blocked her view: "I was alone in the world, it was an extraordinary impression and I said to myself: this is it, the Tower has taken off! On another occasion the fog started to roll in after the park, it looked like the sea was just behind it!” It should also be noted that this feeling of isolation allows some people to feel (or to be) sheltered from a stigmatised neighbourhood and the delinquency associated with it.

"Perception plays the role of a catalyst: the higher you are, the easier it will be to ignore the ground", notes Alexandre Chabardès, based on the discourses of the inhabitants of the Tour Panoramique (2018: 91). In our interviews too, many inhabitants of this building remarked that they felt protected, removed from the acts of incivility in the neighbourhood. They mention urban rodeos for some and burnt-out cars for others. One couple pointed out that they hardly hear the sirens of the police cars and fire engines and only find out what has happened the next day when they talk to the neighbours and go shopping nearby.

While height provides a feeling of escape and security from the various nuisances of the city and if it projects us into a space outside of time, we noticed that it could be just the opposite, a good connector to the spaces and rhythms of the city and to its daily life. It could thus play the role of a 'spatial switch' (Lussault, 2007) and temporal switch, connecting people to the different places and temporalities of the city.

In Braşov, our interlocutors from building K affirm that on Sundays they open the windows and thus participate in the Orthodox Christian mass in the neighbourhood, without the need to move, a mass now transmitted over the loudspeakers. On the one hand, the height accentuates the feeling of being cut off from the neighbourhood "downstairs" and the noise of traffic and the construction site. On the other hand, it also makes it easier to listen to desired sounds, such as those of the church, and connects these residents to a community of believers who may or may not be physically present at the church.

In the case of La Duchère, we were able to observe a similar phenomenon of connection from the top of the building to the rhythms of the city. A resident of Les Erables told us that over the years he has learnt to look from the balcony of the building towards the tunnel under the Fourvière hill every morning. He tries to see if the tunnel is blocked, which will allow him to adjust his preparation time before leaving for work (leaving earlier or later; enjoying or swallowing his coffee quickly). The view thus allows a better anchoring in the city through height and a better adaptation of the organisation of daily life.

View from a balcony of Les Érables: the traffic jams in the tunnel under the basilica of Fourvière. ©Olivia Legrip, 2019

In the high-rise buildings of the Civic Centre, the balconies also become a window to the city and a means of connection and participation in its daily rhythms for older people with mobility difficulties.

Views from the balcony of Mrs. S. J. ©Bianca Botea, 2017

Views from the balcony of Mrs. S. J. ©Bianca Botea, 2017

 

Views from the balcony of Mrs. S. J. ©Bianca Botea, 2017

Selling the view and reinterpreting height

As we have shown elsewhere⁵, verticality is not a value in itself, it depends on the environmental configurations of the height. In the same way, the quality of the view which depends on the height is not an a priori value, given by the number of floors, it also raises the question of the angles of view and their amplitude. The Tour Panoramique presents various view angles due to its angular and cylindrical shape; the view is oriented in an angle of 54° for the T2 flats, and up to 108° for the T4. The spiked windows spread over the flat allow for more light than flats with a more classical architectural structure (including through-view) (see the recent ethnography by Chabardès, 2018: 87 and following). In the same way that the question of viewing angles arises for La Duchère, in the Braşov Civic Centre the exposure and orientation of the flats is essential not only for light and calmness for the residents, but also in relation to the attractiveness that these high-rise flats may have for advertising displays.

 Angular architectural structure of the Tour Panoramique. ©Olivia Legrip, 2019

 Angular architectural structure of the Tour Panoramique. ©Olivia Legrip, 2019

 Angular architectural structure of the Tour Panoramique
©Olivia Legrip, 2019

In the case of La Duchère, verticality appears through a housing policy driven by the housing shortage. The construction of the bars and then of the Tour Panoramique led to a high type of housing, which nevertheless favoured a link with the ground and nature through the generous spaces left free by the high urbanism. On the other hand, verticality is nowadays 'sold' in luxury buildings to offer a view (cf. Bonneval). Following this idea, the inhabitants of the Tour Panoramique and Les Érables are upgrading their flats by detaching them from the neighbourhood and attaching them to the view. A resident of the 8th floor of the Tour Panoramique opens up the view from the front door to the bay window of her living room so that her guests "dive into the view as they enter".

The question of the view, and more particularly the enhancement of the view, in the case of La Duchère, deserves to be considered in relation to the question of property value. Indeed, the real estate value of La Duchère presents two very distinct spaces, the Tour Panoramique and the Érables on one side, the rest of the district on the other. The particularity of these two buildings lies in the fact that they are heritage buildings, but above all in their great height, which offers an unobstructed view of Lyon (on the highest floors, of course, but also on the intermediate floors, given the position of the two buildings on the hillside). A real estate agent lives on the 17th floor, he bought his flat during the renovation of the Tower (concomitant with the renovation of the district). This flat was used as a warehouse for workers and had, among other things, gaping windows without glass. He bought it back for a pittance and turned it into a showcase for luxury high-rise living. Photographs of the panorama, a green wall in the living room or a jacuzzi under the angled windows (the particularity of the Tower's architecture) can be seen on the website of the family's real estate agency, which specialises in quality properties in the Monts d'Or region. A flat in the Tower, for sale at the time of writing, is described as follows:

"LYON 9 TOUR PANORAMIQUE DUCHÈRE AT THE GATES OF CHAMPAGNE AU MONT D'OR. [...] Located on the 19th floor of a high-rise building. The highest residence in France, labelled Patrimoine de France and designed by the architect F.R. Cottin in 1970. Come and enjoy a breathtaking view at an altitude of over 360 metres. [...] A fire safety service is present 24/7 in a first aid station located at the entrance of the building. 106 lots in the co-ownership [...]⁶".

View of Lyon from the Tour Panoramique. ©Olivia Legrip, 2019

The height, the view and the heritage value of the property for sale without taking the neighbourhood into consideration, although the advertisement insists on the security of the building. In the real estate offer, as in the accounts of Loïc Bonneval's interlocutors, it is possible to go to La Duchère for a building of modern architecture, classified as heritage (the Tour Panoramique for the ad, the Barre des Érables for buyers aiming for standing and an architect's building). Indeed, "if the view is often the most obvious theme through which the value of height is expressed, it is neither the only one, nor is it unequivocal: it can refer to ways of living, to the choice of housing, or even to a logic of positioning in relation to the neighbours" (Bonneval and Gentil, on this website). These two buildings in La Duchère (the Tour Panoramique and Les Érables) have retained an important value, despite the downward dynamic of the stigmatisation attributed to the Duchère district.

The towers (and bars) are thought of by the high floors for the inhabitants, in other words: being high up in La Duchère is no longer really being in La Duchère, according to some of our Duchère interlocutors, as the real estate advertisement also shows. The differentiation between dwellings (and inhabitants) is not made by location but by height (high floors vs. low floors), especially in the sub-neighbourhoods affected by the urban renewal. Social housing is associated with the lower floors and "luxury" flats are on the higher floors. Indeed, the renovation of the "Plateau" district in La Duchère has forced the removal of inhabitants who were living in social housing in the high floors of the destroyed bars. Thus, couples with several children who were living in T5 apartments on the 15th floor, for example, were then able to move into new flats in the new buildings with few floors, but as they were now retired, these couples were housed in T2 apartments on the 1st floor. They suffered a downward residential dynamic while the newcomers (from the Tour Panoramique and Les Érables) were able to "show off" by buying the so-called "view flats" and/or the duplexes.

Manuel Appert makes a similar observation and shows a dynamic of change between the appearance of high-rise buildings and the effect of separation from the neighbourhood in which they are built: 'at the same time as high-rise buildings are being erected, social housing towers are being demolished, offering a striking scissor effect; order would thus be restored: the sky for the rich and the ground for the poor⁷" (2016: 47).

If the association between a regime in height and economic and social capital is an element observed also in our investigation on the Tour Panoramique and Les Érables building, it is nevertheless to be relativised in other parts of the district, and on the Romanian field, in Braşov. This topographical dimension of height can generate topological effects(otherwise living spaces, particular links, separations etc.)⁸, however these effects are to be understood from a diachronic and ecological perspective, thus at the same time historical, situational and relational. Hence the importance of situating high-rise housing in the environmental configurations that ultimately give it meaning and confer a certain topology on height⁹.In the context of urban transformations where nature is giving way to concrete or the arrival of the shopping centres, we have noted a certain devaluation of high-rise housing, to the benefit of a revaluation in the city of ways of living in connection with nature and a return to the ground. Furthermore, the aspects we have developed here linked to body memories and to the daily and sensory experience of living highlight the fact that relationships to height are rather dynamic in a movement from top to bottom and vice versa, which once again invites us to a pragmatic and relational approach to height.

References

APPERT Manuel, 2016, Les formes de la métropole : du réseau à la canopée, de la mesure au paysage : Tours, skyline et canopée, Géographie. Mémoire final d’habilitation à diriger les recherches, Université Lyon 2, 293 p.

BAXTER Richard, 2017, «The High-Rise Home: Verticality as Practice in London», International Journal of urban and regional research, DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12451.

BOTEA Bianca, 2014, « Expérience du changement et attachements. Réaménagement urbain dans un quartier lyonnais (la Duchère) ». Ethnologie française Vol. 44, no 33 : p. 461‑467.

BREGVIGLIERI Marc and TROM Danny, 2003, « Troubles et tensions en milieu urbain. Les épreuves citadines et habitantes de la ville », in Les sens du public : publics politiques et médiatiques, D. Céfaï et D. Pasquier (dir.), PUF, pp.399-416.

CHABARDÈS Alexandre, 2018, «Ressentir la verticalité : étude de cas de la Tour Panoramique de la Duchère», Master 2 thesis in anthropology, Université Lyon 2. 

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1 We are referring to the three C blocks on Boulevard 15 Noiembrie and the K block on Boulevard Iuliu Maniu (where the Chamber of Commerce is currently located).

2 The first names used in this article have been changed.

3 For the actors behind the urban project, the memorial action is part of a heritage and archiving logic, or is used to mourn and move on to a new stage in the neighbourhood. For the inhabitants of the district, memory is rather an expression of the multiple attachments and links built over time within the neighbourhood, the district and indirectly to the original territories (Botea, 2014).

4 These buildings have been designated as 20^th century architectural heritage.

5 See our two texts "For an ecological approach to height..." and "Politics of verticality and affordances of height" published on this site.

6 « LYON 9 TOUR PANORAMIQUE DUCHÈRE AUX PORTES DE CHAMPAGNE AU MONT D'OR. […] Situé au 19ème étage d'un immeuble IGH (Immeuble de Grande Hauteur). La résidence la plus haute de France, Labellisée Patrimoine de France et réalisée par l'architecte F.R. Cottin en 1970. Venez profiter d'une vue époustouflante à plus de 360 mètres d'altitude. […] Un service de sécurité incendie est présent 24/24 et 7 jours sur 7 dans un poste de secours implanté à l'entrée de l'immeuble. 106 lots dans la copropriété [...] ».

7 "At the same time as high-rise buildings are being erected, social housing towers are being demolished, offering a striking scissor effect; order would thus be restored: the sky for the rich and the ground for the poor' (2016: 47).

8 For this distinction between a 'topographic' and 'topological' approach to height see Christopher Harker (2014).

9 See our contribution For an ecological approach to high-rise living on this website.

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