ABSTRACT

The word ‘bidonville’ is the French equivalent of the English word ‘shantytown’. It was first used in Morocco in the 1950s, during the French protectorate, to refer to poor neighbourhoods where the roofs of makeshift houses had been cut out of metallic fuel containers (‘bidons’), but between the 1950s and sometimes as late as the 1970s, the word bidonville became quite commonplace in the metropole, where thousands and thousands of immigrant workers, responding to a growing demand for cheap labour, found it impossible to have access to decent accommodation. In the 1960s, a generalised housing shortage due to the destruction of properties during the war and to the rapid growth of urban populations was compounded by their arrival. As a result, bidonvilles appeared all over France.