Jacques Donzelot is considered one of the leading French scholars of urban transformation from the observatory 'special' which are the banlieues. In his book alternates between a strong historiographical reconstruction anthropology, sociology. He recently published an essay in which returns to the riots of November 2005 - When the city comes undone - by proposing a model of analysis of urban transformations and a "deconstruction" of the public in the banlieues. A text that can be considered as a new chapter of a book began writing thirty years ago and took steps such as analysis of the families of Police, the State leader. Essay on the Politique de la Ville with Philppe Esteba (1994) Making and society: urban policy in France and the United States (2004). The interview took place in Rome, where Jacques Donzelot spoke at a seminar organized by the University of Rome before moving to Bari to attend a conference on the suburbs of the South, organized by the CGIL.
In France, the riots of November 2005 in the banlieues have been interpreted through the grid of a dormant ever "social question". Contrast, there were scholars who have read the riot of banlieuesard as a phenomenon of rejection of forms of government of the urban reality. What do you think?
I would say that the revolt of the banlieues are both phenomena ii. We are, in fact, opposite is the manifestation of a "social question" that has a directed specifically against underground forms of urban governance. It should indeed be blind not to recognize the profound inequality that affects the access to education, employment and especially in a job that is consistent with studies made in the case of a person residing in the districts of so-called "confinement." At the same time, we can only start from the fact that in the banlieues is for half of social housing available throughout the country. They are urban settlements that recall the shape of the enclave that is the result of excessive decentralization of administration.
Discrimination affects, however, with chilling accuracy: the same requirements, the chances of being hired for a young banlieue compared to a young white native and from an affluent neighborhood is 1 to 2. It is undeniable that the skin color of a young boy beur is considered a handicap by many employers, fearful that his presence was unwelcome to many customers, if it is a work in close contact with the public. At the same time, we must be stupid not to see to what extent and how quickly the city is fragmented and this fragmentation has a marked tendency to be urban settlements based on elective affinities, social homogeneity and lifestyle that does not social heterogeneity and coexistence with "different." It seems that the middle and upper classes no longer want to share urban space with the 'working world', in all its complex. The upper and middle classes that want to live with his fellows.
Some sociologists such as Marco Oberti (Hughes Lagrange author with a recent study on the riots of November 2005, the revolt in the suburbs, Bruno Mondadori, 2005) argue that the middle classes, especially those working as civil servants would not be hostile the social mixity. Unfortunately, their cases were concentrated in those municipalities where the elected left-wing make special efforts in this direction, forgetting that these are common where the highest percentage of private schools. This is a very insidious logic of separation. In the case of the suburbs affected by the riots of November 2005, we should remember that they have seen forms of insubordination often supported by a "logic of ghetto." Let me explain. As in a prison, where he has only solidarity in the form of hostility against the outside world, shared the feeling of feeling everyone - equally - the victims, the hostility is directed inward and toward the symbols of that concentration camp universe. So, in this case, it burns everything: cars, shops and schools. So, in the revolt of November two years there appears a "social question" and the rejection of a some city policy
The French banlieues was born as a powerful mechanism for social cohesion, modernization of the urban social means, to use a definition used by you. Does not it seem that we are in front of his failure?
Yes, we are facing the exhaustion of that experience. The idea of \u200b\u200bmodernizing the company refers to the last half of the urban war. France was still a rural country with a strong dominant. The city evoked the overcrowding, lack of comfort and hygiene. To attract rural workers in cities to support the process of Fordist industrialization, the state government decided on the implementation of a major project of urbanization whose fundamental principle was to build neighborhoods that were the anti-city neighborhoods in other words do not cause the risks of the city, free from the problem of crowding and the risk of violence urban spaces that enable the working class live a proper family life in a state of hygiene and comfort, without the children play in the street (as it was usually in city centers) or the head of the family spend their time in bistros (in fact, nothing bistros in suburbs). It 's a modernization that promotes the integration of the working class. The house is at work, this is the basic philosophy.
But with the seventies but also witnessing the end of this peculiar form of Fordist urbanism. Urban space, despite the much vaunted exception francaise, France has experienced what has been called a modernization without modernity ....
In a radically changed social context, the effects of 'promiscuity' social appeared increasingly intolerable in the eyes of those sectors of the middle class who reside in the suburbs. Thus began the development stage of "peri-urban 'and the myth of a detached house in the countryside. This happens when you start the process of "confinement", ie the allocation of the apartments have become free with the flight of middle class families in the suburbs of predominantly immigrant from the Maghreb. This has certainly helped to save the most unbearable living conditions in the banlieues, but at the cost of confinement to the most vulnerable population in disadvantaged and remote areas - in both spatial and social sense - from the labor market. This is a situation that refers to this broader process of reorganization of space characteristic of advanced societies, which I defined as a city at three speeds. We witness that the coexistence of three phenomena: the formation of these spaces of "confinement" where there is a kind of stagnation of population in areas not related to the major streams, where groups of immigrants do not feel belong neither to their country of origin nor the society in which they live and the emergence of spaces of "peri-urbanization ', those dominated by clusters of houses more and more distant historical urbanization, home to the middle classes to better protect themselves from the suburbs of racaille, but also because property values \u200b\u200bin urban areas have risen too much even for a middle class family, and finally, the spaces of gentrification: often older neighborhoods of large cities that acquire the same value with increasing presence of representatives of the professions related to the new service economy with their culture and their transnational research services - especially recreational and cultural - of prestige.
In France we see a strong intervention by the public which increasingly is not successful. It is, however, a speech by neo-colonial boundaries in which the banlieue and its inhabitants become the exception due to the rule, a weak point of the republican pact or head of a concrete threat "community" ...
The failure of the public is due to a fierce urban determinism that ignores the men and women living in the urban space. From there, the desire to get rid of this "dangerous people." The so-called "city politics" has become a mechanism that rewards local governments that agree to dismantle the largest possible amount of property they live in ethnic minorities. These properties are numerous, at least the local elected representatives who want to make them disappear. The national agency for urban renewal projects financed by the number of planned demolitions. It is not a form of partnership but a reward and incentive mechanism in Anglo-Saxon style, plus a French authoritarianism. In the French debate
hovers the ghost of the social bond. As for the "politique de la ville," a reference to a necessary search for the social bond is constant. Faced with the resounding failure of what has been done so far, she writes about the real possibility of remaking the city, to rebuild link urban ... The volume
Quand la ville défait if it is dedicated to this possibility. Remaking the city and re-learn how to make society means first of all to rebalance the relationship between places and flows, limiting the time spent in the latter, for example. More generally, through a combination of interventions to support the mobility of people and the elevation of what I call the power capacity of the person at the place where he lives, perhaps we can recapture the spirit of the city, and the power that is untied bind freely in a space that gives each one a private and intimate but it should be open to the outside and movement. With regard to the reality neighborhood of "confinement," it is clear that the major programs are much loved by the demolition of the political system, because the road is more spectacular, more media.
And since the "urban renewal" through demolition will not work if there is no participation of the people involved. According to research conducted in France, we learned that the riots of November 2005 took place especially in the suburbs involved in the scrapping program. It is intended that move from the feeling of people who feel reduced to things that can be moved without having any right of speech and expression. The task of retraining are meaningless unless they are the occasion of the process reverse: the elevation of the power capacity of the populations in their neighborhoods, their cities and in particular in their lives.
