Marginalised Social Housing Neighborhoods in France Presented as Lost Ground of the Republic, the Case of Villeneuve

Claske Dijkema, University of Basel

In the 1950s and 1960s the French state embarked on the construction of large housing projects to deal with post-war housing shortage. Villeneuve in Grenoble and Echirolles was one of these designated priority zones for urbanization (ZUP). 

It was here that the last large housing estate was built in France. It took into account the critiques that had emerged against the earlier constructions that were criticized for their propensity to form ghettos. Villeneuve was meant to become their counter-example. The neighborhood (14.000 inhabitants) is part of Grenoble, a provincial city at the foot of the Alps with roughly 160.000 inhabitants.

A decisive factor in the conception of Villeneuve was the election of Hubert Dubedout as mayor of Grenoble in 1965. The new socialist oriented municipality had large ambitions for the city’s urban environment and a new political vision for the place of the working classes in it, in all likelihood inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the city. The municipality believed that action on space could impact the social life of its inhabitants and the newly elected councilors sought to fight the social and spatial segregation that had become a characteristic of large estates. Villeneuve is therefore not a typical MSHN: it is built according to very progressive ideas, using a multidisciplinary approach, that was locally rooted and supported by actors who remained connected to the neighborhood once it was built. 

Nevertheless, the neighborhood came to deal with problems that are typical for MSHN. Over the 1980’s, in line with national developments, from a rather positive connotation of working-class neighborhoods (quartiers populaires), as reference to places where a renewal of political and civil life was possible, social housing neighborhoods increasingly came to be seen as a place of problems. Local factors that contributed to this impoverishment were the election of a new right-leaning mayor in 1983, which represented a political turning point. Villeneuve came to be seen as the symbol of the city’s socialist heritage and the new mayor redirected investments from Villeneuve to the Northern neighborhoods of Grenoble. The rehabilitation of the old city-center took a liberal turn. While the socialist mayor had been committed to maintaining a working-class and immigrant population in the old city-center, the new mayor let go of this goal and left the rehabilitation to private actors, making place for middle-class French families at the expense of immigrants and families with low revenues, many of whom ended up in Villeneuve. Villeneuve lost the social mix it had originally. The neighborhood experienced increasing pauperization and racialization. 

Throughout the 1990s Villeneuve got increasingly represented as being isolated and enclaved. According to Le Monde “of the initial project that lay at the foundation of the creation of Villeneuve, once considered a modern utopia, “nothing was left but a ghetto” (16/11/1990). The negative image of Villeneuve as a “ghetto” that is “turned inwards” is as much the result of image-making as was its positive utopian image. Nationally, large urban renewal projects were supposed to set problems associated with the ghetto right and came to be considered as a panacea for dealing with social problems (Blanc 2007).

In 2003 the Borloo law, named after the Minister in charge of urban policy (Ministre délégué à la ville), was the foundation for an ambitious National Urban Renewal Program (NURP) targeting 500 neighborhoods built in the 1960s, including Villeneuve. In general, the level of degradation of the buildings was only a secondary consideration in the neighborhoods targeted nationally for urban renewal which depended firstly on the composition of its increasingly racialized population (Epstein 2014). This is also true for Villeneuve.

In 2010, when riots broke out in Villeneuve, the neighborhood became the stage for a relatively new public discourse about MSHN and which is typical for a neoconservative current. MSHN came to be presented as spaces that somehow do not fit; as dangerous and deviant, that are considered as a form of exteriority that menaces the integrity of the republic (Dikeç 2007,2013). Politicians speak of “zones de non-droit”, of “lost ground of the republic” (territoires perdus de la république) and of spaces that need to be “reconquered” (quartiers de reconquête républicaine). Increasingly, MSHN get to be feared as hotbeds for Islamic fundamentalism. Fear of MSHN is nothing new, but the images associated with it have changed over the years. The stigmatization of these spaces is increasingly articulated through ethnic, racial and religious terms Negative connotations of MSHN evolved in the 1990s with references to MSHN as “ethnic” and “religious ghettos,” while these terms were absent in political discourse of the 1970s and 1980s (Dikeç 2007). 

While neighborhood stigmatization is a global phenomenon, there are at least two French specificities. The first is the territorialization of social problems: social policies target certain neighborhoods rather than certain groups of people. The second is the type of discourse that specifically targets these neighborhoods’ racialized population: the spatial vocabulary invested to deal with social problems is currently used as a euphemism for racism in France. An inquiry into the postcolonial dimension of French society through questioning the epistemological sources of the representations of these neighborhoods as ‘other’ is an opportunity for contributing to the existing literature about neighborhood stigmatization.