The deconstruction of the European city: Euralille 1988-1995

Valéry DIDELON, La déconstruction de la ville européenne : Euralille 1988-1995, Paris : Éditions de la Villette, June 2021, 160p.

At the turn of the 1990s, the city of Lille was the scene of one of the most commented and controversial urban planning operations of the end of the 20th century, not only locally, but also nationally and internationally. Known as Euralille, it concerned a 70-hectare sector around the new Tgv station that would soon put the capital of Flanders within an hour's drive of the great European metropolises: Paris, London and Brussels.
With some thirty years' hindsight, Valéry Didelon looks back at Euralille, which has become France's third largest business district, not so much in terms of its urban form or architectural style as in terms of the process that generated it and which reflects the neoliberal turn in city planning: a mixture of the decline of the welfare state, the rise of private operators and the crisis in the status of the architect-urban planner.
The book is thus organized around three main characters of this history, major actors and pioneers in their respective fields: Rem Koolhaas, a world-renowned Dutch architect who would become one of the greatest stars of architecture, Pierre Mauroy, the city's socialist mayor and a politician of national stature, and above all Jean-Paul Baïetto, the real manager of this project, creator of the semi-public company that financed it, and inventor in France, on this occasion, of the half-public, half-private figure of the "developer", which is today central to urban planning operations.
With a bibliography and an index, the book is completed by an unpublished interview with Rem Koolhaas, conducted by the author.