ABSTRACT
What do people do in architecture? What do they do with it? The discovery of the universe of the “user” and the myriads of “almost nothing” which fill up the passing days, was fundamental for rethinking, revising, questioning, challenging, and often rejecting the discourse and practice of modernist architecture and functionalist urbanism in France from the 1950s to the 1970s. While the discourse on use was an integral part of the postwar debates on architecture and urbanism, it was the impulses from critical urban sociology emerging since the 1950s in France that created the context for a critical assessment of the doctrine and practices of architecture and urbanism.
