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“Social Mixing”: Slogan,Wishful Thinking or Plain Argument? |
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by Philippe GENESTIER |
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| The word “diversity” is the best equivalent for the French mixité sociale (“social mix”). They have different meanings and their uses are multiple in the fields of sociology, local policies and urban planning. This paper attempts to grasp this wide range of meanings and issues and to understand the different conceptions of society and the various models of justice irrigating current political imagination. In a discourse analysis perspective, the paper considers “social mix” and “diversity” as symptoms of current intellectual and ideological contradictions and hesitations. |
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Paradoxical Effects of SRU Housing Act on the Profile of Real Estate Goods Purchasers in the Île-de-France Region |
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by Didier DESPONDS |
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| The French notion of “social mix” claims to be the answer to the dynamics of urban fragmentation and to the increase of territorial inequalities. The so-called SRU Act (December 2000) represents its crowning achievement. The Act sets goals to reach in terms of social housing at city scale. The article evaluates how housing purchasers selected their property between 2001 and 2005. Did the ranking of cities with a high share of social housing change between 2001 and 2005 in terms of house prices and the social profile of housing purchasers? The investigation focus is the Ilede- France Region, with its sharp contrasts and stakes. |
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Social Mixing in Urban Renovation: Dispersion or Re-concentration? |
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by Christine LELÉVRIER |
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Social mixing is a central aim of the programmes of urban renovation launched in France and in Europe at the beginning of this century, housing diversification being the instrument to achieve this. This article, after having reviewed the risks of social mixing within programmes of renovation, which is associated with the patterns of people moving houses, focusses on the paradoxical effects of demolitions and relocations within ten operations within the Paris region. On the one hand – the reverse of the effects of renovation in the 1960s – the tendency is more towards the re-concentration of the poorest families in the ZUS (fragile urban zones) rather than dispersion while the better-off families are moved to more valued localities within the ZUS or beyond it. On the other hand, as a result of these relocations and the life styles of the residents, these urban social recompositions tend towards the fragmentation of the old and large housing estates and/or of the “communes” into small homogeneous residential localities but each differentiated one from the other. This raises concerns regarding the different levels of social mixing and indeed the choice of these social and spatial proximities returns us to the basic questions of cohabitation and inequalities. |
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In the “kitchen” of “Diversity”: Revisiting Experimentations in Nantes |
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by Pierre-Arnaud BARTHEL and Célia DÈBRE
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| To create a diversity of housing in the public sphere is the key idea at the heart of the strategy adopted by the elected representative of Nantes and programming becomes the control lever to generate this diversity (tenants, first-time occupiers and other owner-occupiers). Planners are obliged to include social housing (linked to the construction rights inherited by the social landlords as a consequence of the demolitions carried out in neighbourhoods undergoing urban renovation), make available a new offer of affordable properties and experiment with market-priced, affordable and social housing in the same locality. The implementation of this complex programming allows us to follow the the responses of the social landlords and the developers, the evolution of their practices and professional cultures as well as the persistance of segregationist reflexes and the drive for differenciation argued from both sides. |
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“How we Have Been Become Social Housing Estates (HLM)” Attempts at Social Mixing in Paris at the Start of this Century |
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by Marie-Hélène BACQUÉ, Yankel JALKOW, Amélie FLAMAND and Stéphanie VERMEERSCH
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| This article is based on empirical research carried out in Paris. It examines the mixed income housing policies that the city has implemented since 2002, analyzing its effects on residents’ social and housing trajectories and on social dynamics. It distinguishes two kinds of mobility: active mobility (linked to households moving) and passive mobility (linked to the transformation in the social status of the housing). It shows how the diversity of residents’ social representations about social-mix housing can be understood through the diversity of their trajectories. Living in social mix housing can represent a social ascent or a social displacement; social relations can become exacerbated and even the fear of ghettoisation can be raised, thereby underlining how the aim of creating social cohesion by these strategies is still far from bring realized. |
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From Paris to London: the Challenge of Social Mixing by “key Actors” |
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by Lydie LAUNAY |
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| Social mixing is one of the main objectives of urban policies developed in Paris and in London and justifies interventions in the affordable housing allocation schemes in order to transform low-status neighbourhoods. In this perspective, these policies give special attention to the key workers, considered as an effective “relay” for the social mixing of the working classes and immigrants. However, this policy is risky insofar as it is based on an unverified but supposed acceptance of residents with heterogeneous social and residential trajectories to coexist with others. |
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Gentrifiers for Diversity: Low-Income Housing and the Mobilization of Upper-Middle Class Residents in Boston |
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by Sylvie TISSOT |
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| This article centers on debates among residents of the South End, an inner-city gentrified neighborhood in Boston (USA), over the acceptance of subsidized housing for formerly homeless people. Whereas some strongly opposed this effort, others defended it in the name of “diversity”. This article will analyze how residents used this concept in order to highlight the role of organized white homeowners in urban transformations since the 1960s. Although marked by internal differences, this group contributed to defining the legitimate proportion of a population conceived as “Others” who live in this otherwise affluent neighborhood. An examination of the issues surrounding this debate will therefore illuminate the close correlation between exclusion and inclusion in the mobilization of gentrifiers. |
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Social Mixing or Social Inclusion? Montreal Tinkering in a Game of Multiple Actors |
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by Annick GERMAIN, Damaris ROSE and Amy TWIGGE-MOLECEY |
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| In this article we offer a reading of the history of public interventions promoting social mix as an element of housing policies in Montréal (province of Quebec, Canada), focussing on key moments and illustrative projects, which put the principle of social mix into practice at different spatial scales. However, on each occasion, implementing social mix is not so much a case of top down public policy as an improvised process negotiated between various actors around the issue of social housing. Social mix also tends to be linked less to preoccupations with social cohesion as to the objective of mixing housing tenures; thus, low-rent municipal public housing, cooperative housing and the broader concept of affordable housing all play a key role. Today, the notion of socio-spatial equity is invoked to justify promoting social mix, while its implementation depends heavily on the involvement of dynamic and influential community organizations. |
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Inner City Blues: Standard of Living, Precarious Employment and Slums in the London of the End of the 19th Century |
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by Malcolm MANSFIELD |
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| Charles Booth’s celebrated survey of poverty in London indirectly deals with the sanitary problem caused by overcrowded housing (slums). Noting the failure of an approach towards insanitary housing which presupposed the rehousing of deserving workers and the dispersion of the undeserving following demolition, Booth signalled the risks for the standard of life which resulted from the close proximity of irregular workers with casual labourers. This proximity which was displayed in Booth’s poverty maps was caused by the immobilisation of workers around catchment areas for irregular work. In the final analysis Booth mobilised the same moralistic conceptual apparatus to deal with the problems of the labour market as that which was used by the sanitary reformers. In fact in both cases the problem was identical: the low standard of life of casual labourers. |
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Henri Lefebvre and The Right to the City: What is its Scientific and Political Legacy? |
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by Laurence COSTES |
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| In March 1968 Henri Lefebvre published The Right to the City. Lefebvre was the first and one of the few who dared herald the end of the industrial town, with the development of its outskirts and suburbs, and the advent of the Urban. Lefebvre saw in the creation of this urban society new hope for the development of more favourable conditions for humanity. This paper examines the unique modernity of Lefebvre’s ideas, and the implications of his work. It demonstrates how widely his theories and arguments have been used by a variety of social and political actors, both at national and international level, from urbanists, to politicians and urban sociologists. Their work has justified the greater part of Lefebvre’s intuitions and fears, furthermore confirming that the theories he exposes in The Right to the City have been instrumental in the appropriation of the city by its inhabitants. Their work has opened new avenues for the exploration of the urban phenomenon, one of the most important issues of our day. |
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An Economy of Contacts and Biopolitics. Gaston Bardet and Urbanism as Social Science |
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Luigi MANZIONE |
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| Between 1934 and 1948 Gaston Bardet constructed an idea of urbanism as a “science of human agglomerations”. We are less concerned here with methodolological and epistologogical aspects than with an exploration of doctrinal points arising from a space-society co-involvement caught in an unstable equilibrium between an community-based approach (an economy of contacts) and regulation (biopolitics). Beyond a metaphor of species, the essential question posed is that of limits in relation to the composition of groups and to the space which they occupy in the urban context with references on the one hand, to notions of continuity and to contacts and, on the other hand, to categories of stability and order. |
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