Heloise Finch, University of Michigan
How can day-to-day interaction in domestic spaces influence or modify behavior and beliefs? What can everyday built environments tell us about how people relate to the state? My paper will look at the process of Réunion Island’s political integration with France since the 1960s, focusing on urbanization and urban infrastructure. I am interested in seeing how Réunion Island house-building technologies and urban infrastructure provision have changed since the 1960s, and the way that different social groups have understood the role and impact of technologies used to create domestic environments both in the past and now.

Réunion Island was one of four French colonies which voted to become part of France in 1946 as Overseas Départements of France. After France ceded independence to Algeria its last colony in 1961, French politicians started an enormous investment program to create a group of modern French societies overseas, loyally consuming French products and French culture in a way that its previous colonies never were. The French state has invested extensively in Réunion Island, to make it politically, culturally, socially and technically integrated into France and the EU. In Réunion Island French overseas expansion and the reinforcement of French state presence has been made possible by superior technological capacities, in addition to the legitimate monopolization of force. How did Réunion Islanders feel about being modernized, and were visions in government and in commercial circles coherent or unified about the future path of Réunion’s integration with Metropolitan France?

Between the 1960s and today, the diverse island population has tripled and social relations have radically changed from being predominantly poor and rural, based on agricultural subsistence, to an urban society built on French and EU subsidies. Whilst development projects have often sought to combine industrialization with urbanization, in Réunion Island urbanization combined with political propaganda was favored above promoting industrial production. French and EU subsidies have thus funded very costly and technically outstanding urban infrastructure projects, but owing to high wage levels in comparison with neighboring countries there is over 30% unemployment, a tiny agricultural sector and almost no other primary production. What advantages were there for Réunion Islanders and for French politicians and engineers for investing such large sums of money in Réunion Island’s urban infrastructure?

Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing until today, urban planners in Réunion have attempted to combat and relocate “shanty towns” and their residents, usually living in the urban peripheries of Réunion Island towns. Migration to “shanty towns” was strongly linked to the declining agricultural sector in rural Réunion Island coupled with a significant population increase, largely thanks to French social and health interventions. French government agencies in Réunion attempted to define suitable living spaces and locations for Réunion Islanders, often expropriating and relocating settled populations in the process, in order to control the spread of shanty towns, rationalize urban infrastructure provision and recalibrate Creole self-constructed domestic spaces to standardized, reproducible norms.

Using historic and ethnographic evidence my paper will explore how different “experts” – Metropolitan French and Réunion Island politicians, architects, engineers, sociologists and inhabitants of three different neighborhoods – expressed aims for changing the living conditions in creole homes, and judged the outcomes of Réunion Islands’ new neighborhoods, in the name of the “evolution” of the Réunion Island way of living. I aim to explore how day-to-day interaction with technology in built environments may have influenced or modified behavior and beliefs in the context of Metropolitan France’s ambitions to make Réunion Island “catch up” with the rest of France by overhauling the infrastructure and living conditions of its inhabitants. How have ordinary Réunion Islanders, as well as professional groups and political stakeholders, lived through and interpreted urban technologies and their impacts in Réunion Island?