La politique de la ville en France
Authors: Rigaud Daniel 
Published: January 2018

Urban Policy in France

Urban policy appeared for the first time in France in the seventies to remedy urban and social difficulties in deprived districts. It is still a recent concept in this country. Initially approached from an experimental angle, it progressively became a mainstream public policy. It is nonetheless based upon prerequisites such as transversal ity, globality, territorialisation, mobilisation of inhabitants which is its originality. Today it has become an important research area to analyse the evolution of French society, and in particular the role of the State.

The history of urban policy can be regrouped into three periods. The first period covers the seventies and corresponds to the genesis of this urban social development policy. The main issue at the time was the degradation of vast social housing estates built after the war. It resulted in operations known as «Habitat and social life » which established the first principles for this type of policy. The second period, the coming of age of this policy, coincided with an important political change in France with the election in 1981 of a socialist president (François Mitterrand). 1981 was also the year of the first urban riots in France (at «Les Minguettes », a district of the Lyon conurbation). During this decade a number of schemes were developed which aimed at the Social Development of Districts («DSQ » or «Développement Social des Quartiers ») through crime prevention, social and vocational integration of young people, urban regeneration, cultural development, and education.

The third period, that of of maturity, covers the nineties. The urban policy is based on a single procedure, the «Contrat de Ville » whose objective is to offer a global framework for intervention. The contracts signed between local authorities (communes or groups of communes) and public agencies go beyond the district, where the symptoms are, to deal with the issues at the level of the town or the conurbation, considered to be more relevant. A central question of urban policy is to establish «geographical priorities ». During the eighties, more than 400 districts were «classified » as DSQs, today more than 200 towns are in «con¬ trat de ville », which represents some 1 3 000 districts. This infla¬ tion which means that any french town of more than 200 000 inhabitants is eligible is in contradiction with the notion of positive discrimination which represents a foundation of this policy.

Also, there are different opinions as to what the main aim of urban policy should be (is it a global development policy or a purely social one ?), its objectives (i.e. the possible strategies to implement) and on the methods used (the weight of urban inter¬ ventions leads to neglect of the social dimension).

The urban policy puts into question the evolution of the State which is led to better territorialise its action and to act as an «animator ». Nonetheless, the quest for bringing in the participa¬ tion of the inhabitants has failed. Whereas the deepening of local democracy was one of the strong expectations of this policy, today it's rather an impression of defiance towards practitioners, voluntary workers and voluntary organisations which prevails.