Exploring the Banlieue

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Exploring the Banlieue
Christina Horvath
Guest Editor
‘Banlieues’ have been the centre of public attention in France since the 1980s,
when rioting started in vulnerable suburban areas containing dense concen-
trations of minority ethnic populations. Since the 1981 ‘rodeos’ in the Lyon
suburb of Les Minguettes, successive waves of violence have been witnessed
in suburbs all over the country,1fuelled, according to different commentators,
by socio-economic tensions, police blunders, architectural inadequacies, and,
to a certain extent, urban policies.2In France, urban space and not communi-
ties has been the main focus of state intervention. The first urban policies
were introduced in the early 1980s, and although these were initially aimed at
social development in suburban areas,3by designating spaces of intervention,
they involuntarily contributed to the progressive stigmatisation of a number
of suburban neighbourhoods. The 1990s saw a growth in insecurity and
constituted a turning point in the field of urban policies: increasingly authori-
tarian measures were adopted at the same time as a new focus on security and
police repression. In August 2003, the Minister for the City, Jean-Louis
Borloo declared his intention to ‘break up the ghettos’ by means of physical
renovation, economic development, and institutional restructuring.4Created
to address the physical transformation of the banlieue’s built environment,
the ANRU (National Agency for Urban Renovation) has translated these new
priorities into vast demolition programmes without necessarily seeking to
involve the residents in the transformation of their neighbourhoods. The inef-
ficiency of such top-down approaches and centralised renovation
programmes was demonstrated by the vehement riots in 2005, 2007, and
2010.
In the wake of these outbursts of violence, the necessity of involving inhab-
itants in a reflection on the future of the banlieues has been progressively
recognised. Passed in February 2014, the new Law of the Programmation for
1Scholars who have extensively published on the French suburban riots include Michel
Kokoreff, Didier Lapeyronnie, Alec G. Hargreaves, Gilles Kepel, Laurent Mucchielli, and
Matthew Moran.
2On urban policies, see Hervé Vieillard-Baron, Banlieues et péripheries (Paris: Hachette,
2009) as well as Mustafa Dikeç, Badlands of the Republic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
3Issues relating to the constitution of space by means of urban policies have been discussed
by Dikeç and Tissot as well as Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja.
4Mustafa Dikeç, pp. 120–21.
Francosphères, vol. 3, no. 2 (2014) doi:10.3828/franc.2014.10

the City and Urban Cohesion5made the principle of ‘co-construction of urban
policy with the inhabitants’ the cornerstone of the urban renewal programme.
Today it is generally admitted by researchers as well as urban planners and
policy makers that a purely physical transformation of the cityscape remains
insufficient without a profound change of the ways in which banlieue resi-
dents are perceived by the mainstream population. This new interest in
alternative voices and bottom-up initiatives has triggered a great number of
projects focusing on the memories, histories and heritage attached to the
suburbs as well as attempts to promote new ways of knowledge exchange in
which inhabitants of vulnerable urban areas are involved as partners rather
than being considered by researchers as mere objects of study. It is in this
context that the Banlieue Network was founded in 2012 with the explicit
aim of responding to an increased need for communication between various
urban actors and residents, challenging conventional ways of thinking, and
promoting cross-disciplinary debates about future visions of the banlieues.6
By connecting scholars from a broad range of countries and disciplines with
urban practitioners, artists, stakeholders, associations of residents, activists,
and policy makers and creating opportunities for debate, knowledge transfer,
and sharing expertise, we have attempted to address stigmatisation and fight
negative clichés. One of the network’s key objectives has been to explore the
various ways in which communities are represented in narratives, political
and media discourses, and popular culture. Another aim was to involve a
broad range of partners and to stimulate comparative approaches in order to
contribute to new thinking about ethical, cultural, and social landscapes and
future directions for society.
In July 2013, the Banlieue Network initiated a summer school in Seine-
Saint-Denis. This series of events attempted to use dialogue, debate, and
artistic creativity to dissolve the distance between the city and its suburbs.7It
aimed to capture the creative energy of the banlieue by engaging scholars,
artists, and local residents in processes of knowledge exchange and
124 Chrisna Horvath
5<http://www.vie-publique.fr/actualite/panorama/texte-discussion/projet-loi-programmation-
pour-ville-cohesion-urbaine.html> [accessed 16 August 2014].
6For more information on the Banlieue Network, see <www.banlieuenetwork.org>.
7All articles in this special issue were initially presented in one of the thematic workshop
sessions during the summer school ‘Exploring the Banlieue’ organised in July 2013 as part
of the AHRC-funded research network on the interdisciplinary study of the French
banlieue. We would like to thank the AHRC profusely for the funding that enabled us to
initiate the summer school. We would also like to thank the MSH Paris Nord, which hosted
the event as well as the participants for their contributions to the debates that have fed into
this special issue.

co-creation. About thirty participants took part in the event: mostly scholars,
PhD students, practitioners, and artists from a large number of countries,
backgrounds, and disciplines, including planning, governance, literature,
visual culture, communication, and linguistics. This heterogeneous group
spent a week exploring five north-eastern suburbs of Paris: Saint-Denis,
Drancy, Bondy, la Courneuve, and Bobigny. The participants experienced the
urban periphery through various media, including scholarly debates, film
projections, conferences, public discussions on various themes, and creative
workshops. They immersed themselves in the suburban space through travel-
ling along tramlines, taking suburban trains, and walking between central
Paris and the suburbs and from one banlieue to another.
This special issue emerges from a series of debates and conferences held
during the summer school at the Maison de Sciences de l’Homme Paris Nord
on the themes of banlieue spaces, images, voices, identities, memories, media
representations, and governance. Led by specialists of these subjects, the
sessions explored a great variety of physical and imaginary spaces in the
French urban periphery, including spaces dedicated to work, leisure, and
sociability. They addressed different types of visual representation of the
suburbs produced and circulated by the media, cinema, and scholarly
research. The first session discussed the role that these images have played in
the evolution of the banlieue’s ’visual economy’ over the last decades. The
second workshop focused on the ‘voices’ of the banlieue, investigating various
forms of creative expression in literature and music, and seeking to explore
their emergence and perceived authenticity as well as the principal obstacles
to the involvement of ‘unheard voices’ in decision-making processes. A third
debate concentrated on identity construction in a post-industrial, postcolo-
nial, and multicultural context in which cultural representations of peripheral
areas greatly contribute to stimulating national debate opposing dominant
and dissident discourses. Finally, the question of collective memory was
examined through the inhabitants’ affective attachment to symbolic and often
stigmatised suburban places connected with the past, revealing specific modes
of inhabiting, interpreting, and consuming places as well processes of patri-
monialisation.
Drawing on these interdisciplinary debates, the articles contained in this
volume address the most urgent contemporary challenges identified and
discussed during the summer school. The first of these is the difficulty in
capturing the banlieue’s ‘unheard voices’ and making them audible in
processes of political decision making, urban regeneration, as well as in
literary, photographic, and media representation. In an article focusing on the
Exploring the Banlieue 125

distance between banlieue residents and the French political system, Juliet
Carpenter sheds light on the potential ambiguities and tensions embedded in
participatory processes within the context of regeneration. Her article ques-
tions how far community engagement through participatory democracy does
indeed give a voice to the ‘sans voix’ in the banlieue, within the institutional
context of representative democracy.
While Carpenter’s paper draws on recent empirical work in the Lyon
suburb of Vaux-en-Velin, Jörg Knieling and Claire Duvernet look at interna-
tional examples of recent changes in traditional governance modes. They refer
to conflicts in European cities such as London (2011), Istanbul (2013), and
Hamburg (2009) to demonstrate that parts of civil society in different national
contexts are dissatisfied with current methods of governance. Reactions to this
change in the political environment can be observed in several cities where
processes of public participation, consultation, or civil self-organisation have
been set up. Knieling and Duvernet focus on Hamburg-based initiatives such
as ‘Next Hamburg’ or ‘Right to the City,’ a citizen-driven protest movement,
to explore the changes in the political environment of urban development and
analyse new forms of public dialogue and the roles of different stakeholders in
these processes. They discuss the success and limitations of innovative
approaches to conflict resolution in urban development issues in Germany, as
well as the relevance of these initiatives to the French context.
A second challenge linked with the emergence of ‘unheard voices’ is the
adoption of the appropriate form, genre, and distance with one’s lived experi-
ence that allow one to defy the stereotypes without compromising one’s street
credibility. Exploring the 2005 French suburban riots through the prism of
French-language news magazines, Annick Batard focuses on questions of
authenticity and unheard voices. Situated within the discipline of science of
information and communication, her article contrasts aspects of journalistic
discourse in French news magazines with a radically different approach taken
by the Swiss magazine L’Hebdo and its journalists, who got involved through
the creation of ‘Bondy Blog.’ Though this media discourse is not as dominant
as that on television, it nevertheless contributes to marking out an area of
‘interdiscursive memory,’ in Sophie Moirand’s sense of the term. Having set
out some contextual elements, Batard questions the discursive construction of
news magazine journalists who have constructed a strongly politicised vision
of the suburbs. She compares this with the participative initiative of L’Hebdo
before ending with an analysis of memory inscription mechanisms related to
the 2005 banlieue riots.
The third central thread running through the volume, memory, plays a key
126 Chrisna Horvath

role in Edward Welch’s rereading of Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (1989),
a landmark text for thinking about urban space in contemporary France.
Welch sets out to review the emblematic status acquired by Les Passagers du
Roissy-Express since 1990, highlighting in particular its reflections on the
passage of space through time, and the palimpsestual layering of history in
place that occurs as a result. Welch also considers the text’s articulation of a
phenomenologically based mode of spatial enquiry grounded in walking and
image making. Drawing on the author’s collaboration with the photographer
John Perivolaris during the Banlieue Network summer school, the article goes
on to question how the Plaine Saint-Denis has been transformed in the
twenty-five years since Maspero and Frantz passed through on their way
south, and reflect on the insights afforded by techniques of spatial apprehen-
sion predicated on walking, sound recording, and photography.
The palimpsest metaphor, which has emerged in recent years as a predo-
minant analytical tool in the study of great metropolises such as London,
New York, Paris, or Berlin, is also the focus of Christina Horvath’s investiga-
tion of contemporary banlieue literature. While the palimpsest has been used
to address urban marginality by referring to the idea of an ‘Under World
beneath Over World,’ it has also been conceptualised to investigate the role
played by heritage and memory unintentionally conserved in contemporary
cities. It is easy to demonstrate that Paris’s familiar streets, monuments, and
open spaces are all the products of juxtaposition and transformation.
However, the high-rise housing estates of the French banlieues are rarely
considered archives conserving traces of multilayered memory. By focusing
on representations of spatial exclusion and postcolonial memory in five
contemporary narratives by Faïza Guène, Thomté Ryam, Rachid Djaïdani,
Mamadou Mahmoud N’Dongo, and Rachid Santaki, Horvath undertakes to
explore the validity of the palimpsest metaphor in literary representations of
the French urban periphery.
Elizabeth Auclair takes a different approach to memory in her paper,
which deals with cultural memory projects in the suburbs. Over the last ten
years, an increasing number of artistic and cultural projects relating to the
memory of French banlieue inhabitants have been developed to accompany
residents through the changes and transformations of their neighbourhoods.
Local actors consider these projects relatively simple and cost-effective inter-
ventions, as they often benefit from financial support from the state. Projects
vary according to the local context. They can enhance the memory and
heritage of the area, facilitate the participation of the population, reduce
discrimination, and contribute to social cohesion; however, they also present
Exploring the Banlieue 127

a number of paradoxes. Auclair analyses the reasons why towns promote this
type of project, examines their various objectives and results, and highlights
the main tensions and ambiguities they raise.
Finally, Marie-Madeleine Bertucci proposes to investigate teenagers’ affec-
tive involvement in their housing estates in the disadvantaged urban
environment of Seine-Saint-Denis. Her article draws out the conclusions of a
2009 report carried out for the Ministry of Culture and Communication and
the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration on the theme of Memory of
immigration, towards a process of patrimonialisation. Analysing a body of
work comprising 181 thematically organised texts written by students from
two technical colleges in Seine-Saint-Denis, Bertucci explores the references in
discourse to places that trigger emotional attachment, to which a memory is
attached, and which are the focus of processes of patrimonialisation. She
concludes that these places are characterised by a counter-legitimacy made
visible by the absence of iconic places that does not exclude patrimonialisa-
tion if residents develop links and emotions with those places.
Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, the authors of this special issue
explore and combine in various ways the key issues of memory, participation,
and authentic expression of the ‘banlieue experience’ beyond its locality.
Their theoretical reflections complement the practical hands-on approaches
of the summer school, which resulted in the publication of the collective art
book Voices and Images from the Banlieue.8In their own ways, both volumes
seek to communicate the diversity of the urban periphery and the dynamic
synergies between various art forms and a broad range of disciplines.
Christina Horvath
Paris-London, 2014
128 Chrisna Horvath
8Juliet Carpenter and Christina Horvath, Voices and Images from the Banlieue (Oxford:
Banlieue Network, 2014).