Marginalized Social Housing Neighborhoods in France are not Ghettos but Spaces of Bottom-up Globalization

Claske Dijkema, swisspeace, University of Basel

Urban renovation in the marginalized social housing neighborhood of Villeneuve in France reinforced the feeling that its current, racialized, and poor inhabitants are undesired, and that the objective of the urban renovation effort is to attract a new and desired public. Living with Arabs and Blacks is experienced as a source of “déclassement”, according to a research participant. 

In line with national discourse about ghetto formation in the 1990s, Villeneuve got increasingly represented as being isolated and enclaved. marginalized social housing neighborhoods such as Villeneuve are believed to suffer from the flaw of communitarianism and “secessionism with regard to the Republic”, accusations which are similar to the idea that they are “ground lost to the Republic” (see logbook entry 10/05/21). The French term “communautarisme” cannot be translated into “communitarianism” because the latter does not quite catch the negative connotation of the French term. Just as in English, the term in France also refers to the social networks that people develop predominantly according to their cultural or ethnic affinities, but this is interpreted as a threat to the Republic. A political group can be made up of people with 30 different national origins and still be considered communautariste if the majority are not white French. Communitarianism in French is synonym for not being integrated, or rather of refusing to be part of France, and is associated with marginalized social housing neighborhoods as if people prefer to live separated from the majority society, “turned inwards”. 

Politicians and policymakers have typically turned to urban policy and urban renewal to deal with this perceived threat. According to the urban renewal discourse, Villeneuve is a closed, ghetto-like space that needs to be opened up. In the case of the urban renewal project for Villeneuve, opening up meant the demolition of public housing blocks to provide a visual opening to the 14 hectare park that lies behind a one kilometer long social housing ensemble. The National Agency for Urban Renovation (ANRU) speaks of Villeneuve as a “neighborhood turned inwards (replié sur lui-même)”, of confined public space and of the Arlequin ensemble as “a real wall”: in order “to reintegrate Villeneuve in the urban context of Southern Grenoble”, there is need to “open and extend the park” (1). Elements that were part of the project of conceiving Villeneuve as an urban village at the moment of its creation in the 1960s, are now subject to the joint effort of demolition-reconstruction, presented as a tool to integrate inhabitants into the city. The demolition of part of the Galerie d’Arlequin, the number 50 block, “pour réaliser une percée visuelle vers le parc” was the most symbolic operation of opening up the neighbourhood. Opening up the neighbourhood is thus presented as the solution to the perceived problem of migrants that are believed to be turned inwards and away from French society – the famous problem of integration, which is not perceived as a problem of racism and global capitalism, but as a cultural problem. 

With opening up one can always ask in which direction the flow is supposed to be – let the inhabitants out, as in the sense of giving them access to other areas of the city, or in the sense of letting new people in. It is the latter that is the target of this large-scale urban renovation program, intending to make the neighborhood attractive for the middle-class. The ambiguous objective of the return of the middle classes in marginalized social housing neighborhoods in general targets both the dispersion of the poor and immigrants. ‘Social mixing’ is an explicit objective of this program, the objective in Villeneuve being: “to regain a real social mixing” (retrouver de réelles mixités de peuplement) and “to reduce the overall percentage of social housing (in the Arlequin from 74% to 50% over a period of 10 years)” (Convention ANRU 2008, 8-9) (2). In the neighbourhood there is no ambiguity about what social mixing means – it means less Blacks and Arabs according to research participants. 

My research challenges the representation of MSHN as closed spaces that need to be opened up and civilized. It is stigmatizing discourse, reductive categories and financial reasons that confine inhabitants of marginalized neighborhoods in geographic spaces rather than their supposed traditions and foreign cultures. I consider that the question of opening the neighbourhood should be turned around, and should not be focused on how to attract the middle class and let them in but how to let out a population that is trapped in Villeneuve as a result of capitalist and racist dynamics. The question should also be how to grant this trapped population a “right to the city” (Dikeç 2002; Goonewardena et al. 2008; Harvey 2008; Mitchell 2003; Purcell 2014). 

The decolonial approach to marginalized social housing neighborhoods in France I develop in my research opens up to a much larger and less hierarchical view of spatial connections beyond the nation-state. Instead of seeing a neighbourhood that is turned inwards, I see a population that is open to many different spaces, but that is not necessarily oriented towards the centre, be it the city centre of Grenoble or the national capital, Paris. A signpost made by children during a street workshops proposed by Madame Ruetabaga on one of the central squares of Villeneuve is a nice illustration of this outward orientation. It points to all the directions that people have spatial connections with (e.g. Lebanon, Macedonia, Istanbul). 

Villeneuve is in many ways advanced in regard to what it means to live in a global village, because that is what post-colonial cities are about: a plurality of presences and cultural circulations, a phenomenon that Tarrius has called “bottom-up globalization” (mondialisation par le bas) (2010). According to the perspective of public authorities one sees social and ethnic divides (fractures) but if one adopts a decolonial approach, one sees groups that “escape the destinies that public authorities have reserved for them” (Ibid.). 

(1) Sources: Agence Nationale de Renovation urbaine, Grenoble Operation de Renovation urbaine du Quartier Villeneuve-Village olympique, Convention, June 2008; Actis, Le Quartier Villeneuve Convention Villeneuve, 2009.

(2) Some 74% here and 78% mentioned elsewhere in the same document.