A Changing City

“A city isn’t so unlike a person. They both have the marks to show they have many stories to tell. They see many faces. They tear things down and make new again.” -Rasmenia Massoud-

This being the first article of what will hopefully be a monthly column, I want to start by explaining why I am writing and what I want to achieve by doing so. Being new in Le Havre is the one common experience shared by all students here but one. That being so, I thought it would be interesting to gain a better understanding of the city. However drab its sky may be, however crumbled its houses’ facades are, there still are little treasures to be discovered and cherished. I believe that by understanding our surroundings more, we are able to look at them in a new light and perhaps even recognise some beauty in the ordinary.

The goal of this introductory article is not to provide an in-depth presentation of everything shaping Le Havre’s identity as that would require several books. Its objective, rather, is to “paint” a superficial portrait of the city, hopefully providing interesting insight into the life of its communities and the conditions in which they live. As it goes on, this column will explore much more specific aspects of life in Le Havre by interviewing people, studying particular places in the city, such as neighbourhoods, landmarks, local institutions, and their significance to the city and its inhabitants, and more. You can think of this column as a figurative treasure hunt, with me looking for the city’s gems. Before we embark on this journey, I believe it to be necessary to take a step back and look at the city as a whole, its history and how it is faring today.

Le Havre was officially founded on the 8^th of October 1517 by King François I. It was established as a military port, as a place for adventurers to depart from. One notable example of an explorer would be Giovanni da Verrazano, who left from the port in 1524 to go on to be the first European to land in New York. In the 18^th century, the city shifted from being a military port to a significant commercial hub, trading colonial goods and participating in the triangular trade, with over 100,000 slaves being shipped through Le Havre. Interestingly, this detail is very much downplayed in the city’s official account of its history, only mentioning the triangular trade once and calling its role “marginal”, completely omitting slavery. During the Industrial Revolution, Le Havre experienced an economic Golden Age, fuelled by the trade in colonial goods such as cotton, coffee, and chocolate. At this time the city’s stock exchange was the second biggest in world, rivalled only by that of New York. The Second World War brought ruin, as allied bombings destroyed large parts of the city with around 20,000 houses razed to the ground. Le Havre was rebuilt after the war but failed to attain its former industrial glory. From 1956 to 1995 the city was under left-wing (Parti Communiste Français) administration, since then it has shifted to the right, with Édouard Phillipe (Horizons) being its current mayor. This shift from a social democrat to a neoliberal political regime has had striking consequences, as I will elaborate further below.

To get an idea of the wellbeing of the city, or rather that of its people, we can look at Le Havre from a statistical perspective, using data from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). The most striking information revealed in its “dossier complet” of the commune is an unemployment rate of 20.8% in 2020, versus only 8.6% in all of metropolitan France at the same time. Some tentative explanations for this extraordinarily high rate are offered by Anita Menendez, head of CGT Le Havre (France’s biggest labour union), and Emilie Roland-Parzysz, director of the O2 agency (elderly care). According to them, this high unemployment is to be blamed on a lack of professional training accompanied by the city’s industrial specialisation, on refining and petrochemicals for example. This combination leads to limited professional opportunities and increased economic precarity.

Le Havre is a city in transit. Inspired by Bilbao and Liverpool, a neoliberal reimagination of the Havrais cityscape took place in the 1990s and is currently still being implemented. According to Antonin Girondin, PhD at Caen-Normandy University, there is no more blatant example of this than what used to be called the “Quartier de l’Eure”, now known as “St. Nicolas”. This area in the south of Le Havre, right next to the SciencesPo campus used to be an archetypical working-class neighbourhood, housing the dockers and other port-affiliated workers. In the mid to late 2000s, this area got caught in the crosshairs of the combined interests of real estate investors and the city’s now neoliberal administration. Here Le Havre’s shift in political orientation becomes relevant, as the city is opened up for private investment and speculation, reflecting the paradoxical relationship between the neoliberal condemnation of the state and its simultaneous reliance on the state’s monopoly of violence. What I mean by that, is the private sector’s rejection of public regulation (profits, pollution, etc.) on the one hand, and a reliance on public policy, finance, and force, if necessary, to lay the foundation for investment. In very typical fashion, public funds were used to renovate and transform the “Docks Vauban” into a shopping mall. The way was thus paved for private investors to start building residential housing in the former workers’ neighbourhood. This connection between the public and the private sphere is very explicit, as is shown by extracts of an interview with a key member of the city hall: “We therefore conducted a discussion with the developers on the feasibility of good quality housing programs. The latter wished for (in addition to the repair of the streets already started several years ago) the construction of a new footbridge above the Paul Vatine basin as an extension of rue Bellot and the creation of quality public spaces as well as the fact to provide a view of the pools for the new apartments.” (translated from French). These programs did not take long to show results, the buildings constructed between 2007 and 2010 were between 1.5 and 2 times more expensive than the average real estate in Le Havre. This increase in the price of housing immediately reflected itself on the social fabric of the neighbourhood. Between 2010 and 2016 the proportion of workers dropped from 44% to just 27%, while the proportion of people with white collar jobs nearly tripled.

Figure 1: Evolution of the professional composition of St. Nicolas

Girondin makes it clear that this is a clear instance of “new build gentrification”. This concept developed by Mark Davidson and Loretta Lees in 2005 describes a kind of gentrification characterised by the erasure of working-class social markers and the “quasi-systematic” destruction of industrial and working-class architecture to make place for higher-end residential buildings. The old architecture’s remnants are destined for commercial use, with the example of the Caillard shipyards, a 70s and 80s landmark of worker’s struggle, being transformed into a supermarket. There is an underlying violence to this process, an entire class witnesses the destruction of its symbols and its living space while speculators are already drawing the plans for what they are to be replaced by.

While the workers are being driven away from their neighbourhoods, the city has another problem: it is shrinking. Since 1975 Le Havre has lost seven percent of its population. The concept of the “shrinking city” is not a new one and is often used to describe what happened to post-Soviet cities in eastern Europe after what economists fittingly call economic shock therapy. Indeed, we can draw a parallel between Le Havre, also known as Stalingrad-sur-Mer, and post-Soviet cities such as Budapest, Bucharest, or Tallinn. Both the late Eastern Bloc and Le Havre in the 80s were in economically precarious situations, albeit for different reasons. In each case the incumbent left-wing administration was replaced by a right-wing one. In both cases, the new administration made it their raison d’être to dismantle what their predecessors had built, concretely this meant using public authority to privatise public infrastructure, an unconditional opening of the public realm to capital. After this forced opening, conditions in the post-Soviet states and in Le Havre deteriorated massively, with millions of excess deaths in Russia and a constantly worsening urban exodus in Le Havre.

What we see in Le Havre then, is a city under attack. We see the consequences of deindustrialisation and its effects on the people it formerly benefitted. Most importantly, we witness a transformation of the city’s soul, from a working-class bastion into a shadow of its former self, ravaged by the liberalisation of the real estate market and demographic decline. What makes this city special are, in my opinion, its people. Be it the student community in SciencesPo or the Havrais people in general, they make the life here worthwhile. Its diverse communities create a unique and enriching environment, its cafés, boulangeries, and restaurants are places for discussion and diversion, and its cinemas provide a so often needed refuge from our daily routines. We have much to look forward to here, even during the rainy days, which will probably be most of them.

“But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.”  -John Updike-

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Lino BATTIN 1AS is starting his own columm about the LH life and its people.