Public housing from within: childhood memories as a landscape of care

This visual and auto-ethnographic essay – through research in private archives and childhood memories – aims to reconstruct the history of a public housing building on the Place du Marché in a small town in the Paris suburbs, Viry-Châtillon, and to show the transformation of the ideal of public and social housing in the suburbs of the capital. Through amateur and family photographs, we will examine the organisation, construction and transformation of this site at three key moments: the 1950s, the 2000s and the present day. This method of photographic analysis, which is also intended to be artistic, brings together the personal archives taken by my grandmother, the photographs taken by the author in 2004, and the photos taken by my grandmother again, in 2024, whom I asked, using a disposable camera, to take a portrait of the public housing building in which my flat was located and the urban context in which it is inserted. The result is a mixture of photographs taken in different temporalities and geographies that create a multifaceted portrait of public housing as a landscape of care based on childhood memories. Cover image: me and my parents on the balcony of our apartment (1997) author: my grandmother.