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    Do the Suburban Enclaves Need an Umpteenth Plan?
    By Stéphane Beaud, Isabelle Coutant, François Dubet, Michel Kokoreff, Didier Lapeyronnie, Olivier Masclet, Serge Paugam, Gérard Mauger, Laurent Mucchielli, Yasmine Siblot, Patrick Simon, Loic Wacquant, Agnès van Zanten
    Libération

    Tuesday 22 January 2008

We are sociologists of diverse theoretical and methodological orientations who have been working for 20 years on the situation of the blue-collar suburban enclaves. Today, we sign this joint text to denounce the blatant inadequacy of the diagnosis and insufficiency of the remedies proposed by the Amara plan to erase the continued impoverishment of the urban periphery's stigmatized neighborhoods.

    For 20 years, every new legislature has become an opportunity to launch a suburban enclave plan without even taking the trouble of evaluating the preceding one. The plan-before-last, Jean-Louis Borloo's "urban renovation" proposal, aimed to "break apart the ghettos" in order to reestablish "social cohesion." It hadn't yet produced any first effects when the new Secretary of State for the City - the 19th to occupy that position in 17 years - already presented a new "Marshall Plan," "Hope for Suburban Enclaves," also supposed to resolve everything. Three directions of "new" action are announced: education, employment, opening up of urban enclaves. In the middle of the 1980s, education (the "ZEP"), youth employment (the local "Missions") and the opening up of urban enclaves (the DSQ) were the Socialist government's priorities. In the 1990s, the "free zones" were supposed to restore employment, educational supervision was supposed to nurture scholastic success, city policy was supposed to urbanize the neighborhood enclaves. Today, the labels have been changed, but the only innovation is that everything is being done in miniature: after targeting 13, then 26, then 150, then 751, then 163, the new plan targets 50 neighborhoods. Why 50? What will become of the others?

    One will always be able to comment on Fadela Amara's ambition, to suggest that even her minister responsible for that portfolio hardly believes in the plan and doesn't hide that skepticism. In spite of the president of the Republic's very public support, ministers' commitment to this interministerial policy that has never really succeeded in being one seems, as it has each time before, less than whole-hearted. Certainly, the plan budgets a billion Euros. But this government's fiscal gifts to the richest households amount to 15 billion Euros, which perfectly summarizes its priorities.

    Must we conclude from all the foregoing that all these policies are useless? Certainly not. The Raffarin government had slashed deeply into social program budgets, cut off credits to associations and done away with the local police. That policy contributed directly to the November 2005 riots. Now, nothing has changed since then. In the neighborhoods where we have done research, no one has any illusions about the impact of an umpteenth plan. Between its communications and its actions, the credibility of the State and its representatives has evaporated. For the inhabitants of the housing projects, the president of the Republic's election was won "thanks" to their public stigmatization and his own failures as Minister of the Interior. That the government envisages discreetly recreating a "neighborhood police force" will not be enough to restore a semblance of legitimacy to policies that had lost any or to a Republic that has so betrayed its promises that its representatives are sometimes despised.

    For 30 years, while the country has continued to grow richer, virtually doubling its GDP and in spite of successive plans, the situation of the suburban enclaves has continued to deteriorate and the inequalities between wealthy and working class neighborhoods have continued to increase. This problem cannot be isolated to the 751 (or 189 or 50) neighborhoods labeled by one procedure or another. In 2006, 25 percent of the population under 65-years-old in Seine-Saint-Denis lived below the poverty threshold, three times more than in les Yvelines. The gap between the average income of Seine-Saint-Denis residents and that of Paris intramural residents has greatly intensified.

    The disparities in the services offered are also flagrant: in 2000, the municipal services in the rich communes of the Ile-de-France enjoyed 60 percent higher budgets than those of poor communes. For two decades, the unemployment rate in sensitive urban areas has obstinately remained double the national average. But in certain cities, among blue-collar workers or those of immigrant origin, the unemployment rate frequently exceeds 40 or 50 percent. The periods of unemployment there are also longer and harder. In the same way, access to health care, transportation and culture continues to negatively characterize the "neighborhood" populations. And the "urban renewal" policy, instead of increasing public housing, is going to reduce the number of big low-rent public accommodations and make access to public housing still more difficult for those who are already excluded.

    Among residents, feelings of humiliation and injustice dominate. They feel they are treated like second-class citizens. They feel abandoned by the government (which also explains part of the "feeling of insecurity") and more generally by a French society that doesn't want them. The massive job deficit and hiring discrimination combine to make the gap between the outlying public housing projects and the center cities ever greater. Public services have withdrawn, apparently more concerned with protecting themselves from the population than with coming to its assistance. School seems more like an obstacle to overcome than like an opportunity. The police spend more time controlling and neutralizing youth than protecting these neighborhoods' residents. The "full employment" goal resonates as an insult for these thousands of youth, who, every year, despair of finding a job, even when they have educational qualifications.

    For 30 years, the country's leaders, on the left as on the right, relegate the blue-collar neighborhoods to the rank of a "social problem." Marginalized by the absence of political renaissance, their residents find themselves imprisoned in the exclusive power of the norm and of order, with their alternatives reduced to passivity or violence. They experience public policies as decisions from on high and far away, at best intended to do them some charity to keep them quiet. As long as it is not based on a recovered political legitimacy, the umpteenth "suburban enclaves" plan will get bogged down in the swamps of communication and impotence. Until the next riots, until the next plan. The blue-collar suburbs don't need another plan, but an overall and continuous policy of job creation, public service enhancement, reduction of inequalities and active struggle against multiform discriminations.