The Poplars housing development in suburban Paris is home to what one resident called the "Little-Middles" - a social group on the tenuous border between the working- and middle- classes. In the 1960s The Poplars was a site of upward social mobility, which fostered an egalitarian sense of community among residents. This feeling of collective flourishing was challenged when some residents moved away, selling their homes to a new generation of upwardly mobile neighbors from predominantly immigrant backgrounds. This volume explores the strained reception of these migrants, arguing that this is less a product of racism and xenophobia than of anxiety about social class and the loss of a sense of community that reigned before.

Marie Cartier is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nantes, researcher at CENS (Nantes Sociology Center, CNRS-University of Nantes). She is a former Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She combines ethnography and history to study the transformations of the working-class through employment and living spaces.