Contenu du sommaire : Questions de banlieues

The different meanings attached to the word "suburb" (when used in French) lead to confusion. The term was first used in a legal and then administrative sense, but it represents primarily a field of study for the social sciences. The media show considerable interest in this area, but the producers of relate images show little understanding of the processes which lie behind their existence. The problem districts of the suburbs have also become the implicit focus of government urban policy, arising out of a concern which has long existed to provide social housing. The notion of suburb has a peculiar sense in France, developed in relation to a capital city which has a symbolic importance unknown elsewhere, and integrated into national policy-making from the 1970s. It has become outdated to reflect in terms of a centre and a periphery, taking no account of other spatial configurations and to view suburbs as organisms which inevitably develop disorders requiring remedial action.

Issues of urban deprivation have played an important role in policy discussion in Britain since the 1970s. Government and various official agencies have adopted statistical approaches to the identification of deprived areas, based on census data for the construction of standart indices. One of these indices (the Townsend Index) is here applied to four major British cities (London, Birmingham, Newcastle- upon-Tyne and Sheffield) and, in each case, it is demonstrated that there is a strong contrast between high deprivation levels in inner city nighbourhoods and relative affluence throughout the suburbs. The populations of deprived areas are shown to include over-representations of those with poor health, families with dependants, lone-parent families, large families, unskilled workers, and those declaring a non- white ethnicity. The elderly were shown not to be concentrated in zones of deprivation. The greatest over-representations were of single parent families. There were certain variations between the cities : in both Newcastle and Sheffield deprived zones included few non-white residents, while the over-representation of families with dependants, of large families and of the unskilled in deprived areas was greater in Birmingham than elsewhere. Both the spatial location and the population composition of deprived areas are different from those experienced in certain other parts of Europe.

This article retraces in France the development and principal characteristics of the geographical priorities accorded to urban policy. Over the last twenty years, in relation to problem suburbs, this has taken the form of a positive territorial discrimination. The dificulties of such public-sector intervention and of this conception of suburban areas are shawn by the continued inflation of such priorities and the limits to its statistical objectivity.

For many years, urban geographers wrote about the decentralisation of population within urban areas which resulted in the inner city having a declining number of residents and increasing poverty. More recently a counter movement has been noted in which middle class people return to the core area, a process often referred to as gentrification. This paper examines the trends in Manchester, an old industrial city which is still suffering from stagnation and decline. Population growth is being experienced in the city centre, in redeveloped docklands and in inner city areas close to the city centre which are being redeveloped for the second time. Older inner city areas, not adjacent to the city centre where there was rehabilitation rather than redevelopment are experiencing decline with house prices falling, properties becoming derelict and abandoned and increasing social problems.

The aim of urban tax-free zones is to facilitate, in districts with long-term social problems, the integration of people who have become marginalised in society by the revival of the local market economy. The majority of official reports have strongly criticised this policy. However, study of tax-free zones in the Rhône-Alpes region provides a less clear- cut picture, both in terms of the number of jobs created and the real cost. The interest of this type of public-sector policy is perhaps related more to the increase of the functional mix of the districts in question than to the provision of employment opportunities.

Analysis of the strategies of administrative officials and the rationale of allocating accomodation in the "Arc en Ciel" estate emphasises its specificity, namely to promote the social ascension of its inhabitants. The failure of this program, due in part to the singularity of this area, completed the decline of the estate and further stigmatized its residents. To reverse this trend, will it be enough to simply restructure the estate ?

The detailed study of two working-class housing estates in the suburbs of Lyon and St. Etienne, today deserted by the industries which were at their origin, questions the way the media almost systematically present 'problem' suburbs as zones of poverty- Analysing both individual strategies of house purchase and appropriation of buildings as they are rehabilitated shows the resistance of residents to such generalization about the areas in which they live. A link can be seen with a tradition of sociability, generated through working together, which still exists despite the closure of factories. Given that these two estates are structured and integrated areas with an industrial heritage, it is inappropriate to consider their present situation merely in terms of their urban location and the current restructuring of market economies. Thus the term "problem suburb", in the sense that it is used by the media and scientific communities loses much of its sense if the phenomenon of desindustrialisation is not taken into account.

Demolition is a common process in transforming the built environment, but it has a particular connotation when it concerns problem suburbs. The analysis of three demolition operations provides an insight into this special status. To justify such demolition three types of argument are commonly used, all linked to the idea of a rational approach to urban management : the physical decay of buildings and the vacany rate, the need to diversify the types of residents and the creation of new urban development projects. However, these arguments do not stand up welle to detailed examination. Behind such justifications it seems possible to discenr a form of symbolic action, related probably to executions and sacrificial practices, to which contemporany society seems to be attached.