From iconography to marketing: Post-modernism as a stretegy of political statement in the case of Montpellier

Abstract

Since cities concentrate the vast majority of the population today, imposing oneself politically in urban areas amounts to imposing oneself politically facing the majority of voters. Consequently, many governments use urban development projects and "model" planning as a tool for the construction of social belonging and political statement. It adds to this, one of the latest exploits of globalized capitalism, urban marketing: today there are known examples of urban strategies in which cities were or are being treated as commodities. Antigone is a special case for three reasons. First, it is the construction of an entire neighborhood in an abandoned military zone, subject to constant flooding, that is however near the historic and commercial center of Montpellier. Second, the project was used as a symbol of a policy change from a municipal right-wing government to a socialist-oriented government, in power for the first time. Third, the project included an amount never seen before in social housing in the city center, showing a strong contrast to the housing projects undertaken by previous administrations, which earmarked the more peripheral areas of the city to these ventures. The presented article proposes both an analysis of the logic of political statement through urban planning models and an analysis of the "Antigone Project", trying to show the extent to which ideology of iconography and the political objectives of the Mayor helped or harmed the quality of housing in the neighborhood and the insertion of this neighborhood in the existing urban web.