French Theory

Why have French Christian thinkers influenced urban theory?

Jacques Ellul wrote a seminal critique of technological society, how technics controls our lives, shaping our thinking. He exposed Cain’s negative foundations of urbanism in violence, murder, militarism & imperialism.

Michel de Certeau examined ‘everyday life’; how people create their own city through their own practice. He detailed how new opportunities and subjectivities were opened up through walking the city. He demonstrated how mysticism breaks through rationalist control to transcendence.

Like De Certeau, Gaston Bachelard recognised still-extant possibilities for creation within urban determinisms. He depicted the poetics of space and reverie. How subjectivity relates through imagination to the external world, including the physical materiality of cities.

Paul Virilio, still alive, is an expert on urbanism: its origins in militarism, and speed’s dominance in our technologically-driven lives. A self-conscious heir of Ellul, he repeats the depiction of closure, the prevalence of catastrophe, accident, within panic's city.

These writers are pregnant with suggestions, concepts for theorising, influential on many critical and urban theorists.

What role has their faith played in their analysis, both of the closures and openings within the city? Does it matter that they are Catholic, with Ellul the only Protestant?