Deadly housing crisis enrages the people of Marseille

In today’s blog post, Leon Reichle reports and reflects on the recent collapse of residential houses in central Marseille, contextualizing it as an ugly face of urban redevelopment policies and arguing for the close attention that should be payed to the emergence of a movement of city dwellers determined to fight for housing justice.

In the city that hosts Europe’s largest urban redevelopment project (since 1995), the housing conditions of the poor have resulted in a deadly crisis. On the 5th of November Taher, Simona, Fabien, Niasse, Julien, Ouloume, Sherife and Marie have lost their lives under two crumbling buildings in the heart of Marseille. The rage about their deaths and the following mass evacuations gave birth to a movement full of interesting coalitions.

Economically, Marseille has never really recovered from the deindustrialisation and decolonisation, which the shift towards tourism economy cannot make up for. With an unemployment rate that is almost 50% higher than the national average, it is the poorest city of France, with over a quarter of the people living in poverty and many more very close to it. With its somewhat contradictory urban development, the European Cultural Capital of 2013 is also the only city in France, where the city centre has not been (fully) gentrified. At the time Marseille hosts Europe’s largest urban redevelopment project Euromediterranée since 1995, which wants to attract enterprises and create an “intelligent, connected and durable town” and is in line with the touristification of the city. How very durable this city has become under the rule of its republican mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin, who has been in office for 23 years, is shown by the current housing crisis. Gaudin, who has earlier allowed himself statements in favour of the “replacing of foreign populations”, is now attacked for the policies that have left large parts of the city to decay, especially those housing the poor and several generations of migrants, by a growing counter movement.

Noailles, known for its markets and Maghreb shops and restaurants is a historic migrant and working-class district marked by the dilapidation of its houses. However recently its central market has been temporarily displaced in favour of an urban renewal program coordinated by a local society for urban renovation and a luxury hotel is under construction. In the little streets that still host informal markets, the police presence has visibly increased in the last years. Parallel to the ambitious renewal projects, the residential houses have continuously deteriorated up to a point where the state of the houses has become life-threatening.

On November 5th, two of the run down houses in Rue d’Aubagne, number 63 and 65 literally reached the breaking point. One of them, number 63, was abandoned, as it had been declared unsafe already in 2012, when the owners of flats were forced to sell to the city. “It is the same in many parts of the city, they just shut off the electricity at some points and board the houses up”, says Martha, a young teacher that used to squat in Noaille. The other building that collapsed, number 65, was still inhabited, even though residents had repeatedly reported the unsettling conditions and some of them had already left their flats, because the doors did not close anymore. A report issued in 2015 considers 40,000 buildings unsafe in Marseille, out of which only 111 have been evacuated. “It’s crazy because you see the cracks in the wall but you never think that the houses will actually collapse”, utters Martha in disbelief.

Since the collapse of the houses, over 1800 people have been evacuated and many of them are enraged.

A woman in a protest tells the news reporter “Before I didn’t protest in Marseille, because I thought, well it probably serves nothing, but now, there is a thing of – we don’t have a choice, in fact, we don’t have a choice anymore! There are people who died! My friends got evacuated! There are people who just die in their homes!” This marks an interesting turning point in Marseilles housing policies – as they are now being contested by many who have not made their voices heard up to this point. Those who have been evacuated after the crashes have been placed in hotels all over the city, partly far from their jobs and their children’s school and complain about bad conditions and a lack of information and respect, like an angry woman confirms “We are not given any news, and we are spoken to, as if we were unwanted… I have to remind them that we are not in this hotel for holidays!” Together with the friends and families of the victims, with local activists and a broad mix of Marseille’s residents they form a protest movement that has repeatedly brought thousands of people to the streets.

The Collective of the 5th of November, Noailles en colère (Noailles in anger) started organizing after the catastrophe, provides support for those evacuated and took part in the organization of demonstrations, which have been a platform for a variety of voices. Last Saturday, on the 1st of December, the protesters reached a number of 12000 people and had to face heavy police violence. Not only was the demonstration joined by members of La France Insoumise, amongst them the Eurosceptic Mélenchon; sans-papiers who protested their evictions, but also by unionists from the CGT and the Gilets-Jaunes, who had a demonstration earlier on the same day. In support of the housing protest, they uttered their solidarity: “We stand next to those that protest these injustices, to support them with our expertise”.

The deadly housing crisis in Marseille stirs horrible memories of Glendfield Tower and is not seen as an accident by many. While millions are being spent on a highly contested redevelopment program in a neighbouring district, La Plaine, no money has been spent for the safety of Noailles residents. “In La Plaine they just built a 2 meter high concrete wall around the construction site so people couldn’t protest it anymore. And at the same time there is no money for housing??” asks Charlotte, a resident.

Much of the anger in the demonstrations turns towards Gaudin, who is definitely not a very likeable face of the cities policies. At the same time, Marseille is no exception in terms of urban renewal along class and race lines, where those who profit from the makeovers are mostly defined by their economic power. A systematic process of strategic neglect up to a point where reinvestment is profitable can be observed in countless gentrifying cities. Yet the case of Marseille is extreme, because the decay is so extensive, dangerous and deadly. This is shocking not only to those immediately concerned, but to many inhabitants of Marseille. The current uproar bears the potential of growing dissent with the ways in which urban restructuring takes place. Smaller protests against the refurbishment of La Plaine are now amplified by angry masses. Whether this movement can resist the intimidation and repression, whether it is patient and determined enough to keep making itself heard, which coalitions it is ready to form and how it is reacted to, remains to be seen. In order to reach any change of direction in urban policy, it is crucial that the housing injustices are continuously made visible, scandalized and contested, as they are far from over. In Noailles, auctions are currently taking place, where the dilapidated houses are being cautiously visited, inspected by and sold to buyers who are rarely planning on inhabiting themselves. “The shittier the better”, confides one visitor of an auction, who plans to resell for the double price, to an undercover journalist.

The death of Taher, Simona, Fabien, Niasse, Julien, Ouloume, Sherife and Marie is not a tragedy caused by the rain, as the city hall likes to put it, it is part of a violent form of restructuring, that devaluates the lives of poor people and eventually displaces them from the city centre. “They have been trying to gentrify Marseille since 20 years now”, says Martha. The housing situation in Marseille is clearly at a very interesting turning point. Whether the evacuated will be able to return to the city centre, in whose interest the money promised by the state will be spent, stays subject to scrutiny.

Leon Reichle is a PhD scholar at CURA with a background in Sociology, who has just started a PhD project on tenants’ interpretations of displacement. As a friend and frequent visitor of the city of Marseille Leon is passionate about developments in the city.

Follow the Protest: Exploring the Limits and Torsions of Collaborative Governance in Nantes

GIF RGB 150 Pixels with Border

In this post Steven Griggs, David Howarth and Andrés Feandeiro  report the findings from the exploratory research in Nantes, carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies.

Referendum watchers in June 2016 may have been rightly fixated on the Brexit vote, which led to the people of the United Kingdom choosing to leave the European Union. But there was another referendum that took place just three days later, even if its political legitimacy as a referendum or consultation was more open to question. On Sunday June 26, in the French department of Loire Atlantique, local citizens voted on whether to give a green light to the construction of a new international airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. The new airport, some 20 kilometres to the north-west of Nantes, would replace the existing Nantes Atlantique airport.

Roughly half of the electorate turned out to vote (51.08 per cent) in the referendum, with a little over 55 per cent of the local residents (55.17 per cent) voting in favour of the construction of the new airport. However, this overall victory masks a fragmented electorate, with villages and towns close to the proposed site for the new airport voting against the project. In the city of Nantes itself, opponents and supporters of the new airport were divided by only 100 votes, with the ‘yes’ vote winning just 50.05 per cent of the share of the vote.

Plans to build a new airport were first mooted in the 1960s. They dropped off the political agenda in the wake of the 1970s oil crisis. But they reappeared in the early 2000s, driven in part by the lobbying of the then Mayor of Nantes, Jean-Marc Ayrault, and his particular brand of urban boosterism. Renewed interest in the airport also served to re-ignite opposition to the proposed development. Campaigners brought together farmers, local residents, politicians, and environmental activists, thus giving a voice to a counter-expertise throughout the legal and planning processes, while drawing in support from across France and Europe. Protesters set up camps and took over vacant compulsory-purchased farms on the proposed site of the airport, transforming the government purchased ‘zone to develop’ into the ‘zone to defend’, where they pursued alternative forms of social organisation. Indeed, their expulsion from the proposed site in 2012 attracted national and international media attention as protesters clashed with riot police.

What, if anything, does this mean for the study of austerity and collaboration in Nantes? At first glance, it may appear that this story of the airport development operates outside of – or parallel to – the everyday practices of governance in the city. After all, it is, despite claims to the contrary, a national infrastructure project, which is subject to national planning practices. Indeed, the decision to hold a referendum was presented as an initiative of François Hollande, the French president. Here, however, we argue that the construction of the airport has come to act as a symbolic issue for protest and contestation across the city of Nantes. It has brought together a broad coalition of groups and campaigns, and poses a challenge to the dominant model of collaborative governance and the Nantes project of urban regeneration and economic boosterism. In other words, it has (potentially) come to define the very limits of collaborative governance and the Nantes model of participatory engagement.

Nantes has arguably not suffered the vagaries of austerity associated with other cities in France. The city continues to attract people and investment; it has reasserted its status as the capital of the west of France, transforming its workforce in the process. Since the closure of its shipyards in the 1980s, the city has been associated with a series of urban renewal initiatives, for example the development of its tram system, the regeneration of the Malakoff neighbourhood and the Ile de Nantes. Successive municipal leaders, not least Jean-Marc Ayrault, have sought to position Nantes at the forefront of European cities, developing its international reputation and attractiveness for its practices of innovation, culture and the environment. In 2015, Nantes was the European Green Capital.

This is not to deny the existence of deprivation across many neighbourhoods of the city. One of the key challenges facing politicians and policymakers in Nantes, repeatedly expressed in interviews, is the increasing number of people in various communities who were deemed to be at risk of falling off the back of the economic growth motor of Nantes. Yet, this risk of social exclusion was not constructed by local officials as a simple consequence of austerity. Budgetary constraints were clearly recognized. But viewed against the backdrop of a city that continues to grow and broaden its local tax base, Nantes was seen as facing a triple crisis. Economic constraints were interwoven with political challenges, as French citizens turn away from traditional politics, and social challenges were discerned in the form of the weakening of established community networks; all of which have prompted demands for new forms of service delivery and governance.

Much of the policy and political response to this triple crisis comes firmly under the rubric of collaborative governance. On the one hand, Nantes has embraced inter-communal collaboration, which has led to the sharing and coordinating of services with its local municipal partners in the inter-communal organisation that is Nantes Métropole. Nantes has indeed become one of the new metropolitan areas recently established by the French state. On the other hand, Nantes city council has invested markedly in moves towards citizen dialogue and co-governance. Like many other developments, this tradition within the city dates back at least to the mayoral term of Jean-Marc Ayrault. But it has become the defining policy commitment of the current Mayor Johanna Rolland. Indeed, building on its neighbourhood forums across the new urban space, the city has engaged in a number of ‘big conversations’, most notably its nine-month consultation on the management of the Loire river, which flows through the city and its region.

However, what are the limits of this collaborative governance in addressing this triple crisis? To answer this question, let us return to the plan to build an international airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. In many ways, this issue has become a mobilising or “nodal” issue for a number of demands against both national and local policies, in which protesters against the airport have also contested the dominant narrative of urban boosterism which has underpinned the official discourses of Nantes. At the end of February 2016, demonstrators against the new airport linked the campaign against the airport to a number of adjacent grievances and demands.

Such articulations were captured in a statement from Christine Poupin, one of the national leaders of the New AntiCapitalist  Party, who participating at the February 2016 anti-airport protest in Nantes claimed that ‘there is a moment when it becomes necessary to say “STOP” … STOP to the airport obviously, but also STOP to its world, and its world is the same as that as the state of emergency as that of the destruction of the employment law…’ Students protesting in Nantes against the reform of labour rights made similar equivalences between struggles, with the regional newspaper, Ouest-France reporting: ‘they shout against police violence, the airport, capitalism, government, bosses.’. Indeed, the project at Notre-Dame-des-Landes has come to be seen as an ‘ideological battle’, in which there is a challenge both to the entire growth model, which many commentators have suggested is a key motif of the Nantes project, and to the very legitimacy of the French state. As expected, the referendum, which François Hollande publicly constructed as putting an end once and for all to debate over the airport has clearly failed to do so.  Local residents have vowed to continue their campaign, with judicial reviews still in place over environmental impacts of the planned infrastructure on water and on rare species. Moreover, as we suggested above, protesters on the ZAD, the renamed  ‘zone to defend’, which covers the proposed airport site, have established their own camps; they have built spaces in which to develop and showcase new ways of living, as well as exhibiting new forms of relationships. They are also preparing to defend another attempt to evict them forcibly from the site.

Such protests and campaigns, coupled with the painful creation of alternative spaces, evoke the limits of new forms of collaborative governance, while exposing various techniques and forms of depoliticisation. The latter might be seen as endeavours to exclude potential alternatives to the current regimes and models of governance under the guise of ‘pragmatic politics’ and the reaching of a rational consensus. Our intuition in this regard is that certain forms of protest and alienation may be rendered invisible or displaced by the dominant discourse of integration and community cohesion (as was arguably the case in the UK as part of the Third Way discourse). It is also possible in this regard that the local and national media focus on the overt and intense protests against the building of a new international airport in Nantes may serve unwittingly to conceal other sets of underlying tensions and cleavages. The protests against the airport have been largely spearheaded by middle-class environmentalists, peasants and anarchists, whereas the troubled neighbourhoods affected by the financial crisis tend to reflect class and ethnic divisions. By ‘following the protest’, while remaining attentive to the way in which ‘political resistance discloses the true operation of power’, our future fieldwork will focus on these related issues.

Steven Griggs is Professor of Public Policy at De Montfort University, David Howarth is Professor in Social and Political Theory at the University of Essex, and Dr. Andrés Feandeiro is a research assistant on the Collaborative Governance under Austerity project at De Montfort University.

Social exclusion and labour rights in the banlieues of Paris: Part II

In this blog, originally published by SPERI, CURAs Heather Connolly writes the second part of her blog series on social exclusion in Paris, and explains how trade union support for undocumented migrant workers is taking place in an atmosphere of growing stigmatisation and social tension.

Last month I returned to the banlieues of Paris on a research visit hosted by CRESPPA-CSU, four months after the November attacks, and during the week of the terrorist attacks in Brussels on 22nd March.  Whilst in Paris issues of social division and community cohesion inevitably dominated political debates and press headlines.

Anecdotally, reaction in the mainstream media in France in the days after the Brussels attacks suggested a lack of recognition of French immigration history and the citizenship status of ethnic minorities from the banlieues. Calls were made by some members of the public to send the terrorists, many of whom had French or Belgian nationality, ‘back home’. This sentiment has been somewhat fuelled by François Hollande’s proposals, as a direct response to the November 2015 attacks, to make controversial changes to the constitution to strip militants convicted of terror attacks of their French nationality (proposals which have now been dropped).

Other important contextualising factors feeding political debates and public perceptions around immigration and social exclusion include the current and emerging tensions surrounding the migrant and refugee crises in Europe, and restrictions of movement and increased police powers as a result of France’scontinuing ‘state of emergency’ (état d’urgence).

As was the case in the Paris attacks, the terrorists in Belgium grew up in the suburbs of Brussels, with high levels of unemployment, particularly amongst second and third generation youths of immigrant origin.

Immigration flows to France are often linked into debates on models of integration and patterns of social exclusion of migrants. France’s assimilationist model has in many ways failed in relation to the integration of past flows of immigrants. As a result second and third generations of immigrant origin find it difficult to access employment and often remain trapped in the banlieues of Paris.

I was in Paris to follow up on my research on trade union responses to immigrants and those known as thesans papiers (undocumented workers) (which Part I of this blog explored), and found a somewhat depressing picture emerging. Immigrants and especially the sans papiers are increasingly being stigmatised and placed under restrictions while trying to live and work in France.  This situation isn’t being helped by the current political debates mentioned above.

Signs initially looked better for the sans papiers when in 2012 the circulaire de regularisation, which sets out guidance and defined sets of conditions for administrators processing regularisation claims was introduced in response to growing unrest among sans papiers workers.  Trade unions, particularly the CGT, have been an important resource for the sans papiers in fighting for criteria for regularisation and in making sure they are applied, even though the circulaire has no legal status and doesn’t give automatic rights to work permits.  The strategy seems to be working and since 2010 the union has obtained some 10,000 regularisations of migrants.

At the same time there have been increasing sanctions on employers found to be employing undocumented migrants, with two circulaires in 2013 against illegal work and against irregular immigration.  Also, there are some who are critical of the circulaire de regularisation, claiming that there have been fewer regularisations per year since its introduction. During last month’s field work with my French colleague Dr Sylvie Contrepois, one undocumented Senegalese worker, who had found regular work in France for 24 years, suddenly found himself without work as a result of the greater restrictions on employers, and without recourse to any rights to unemployment benefit or state aid.

The CGT, one of the largest French trade unions has provided a ‘permanence’ (advice service) for the sans papiers in the banlieues of Paris since 2014.  The union has between 70 and 80 sans papiers attending the ‘permanence’ every week with the aim being to help the migrants to obtain work permits, and the immediate aim to protect them from having problems with employers and the police.

The advice given to the sans papiers demonstrates the uneasy nature of accessing labour rights as an undocumented worker in France.  One Senegalese union activist we spoke to (still a sans papier himself) explained that many of the migrants did not understand the process of accessing their rights in France.  There were heated exchanges between the sans papiers and the union activists advising the migrants, with some suggesting that it was particularly the Bangladeshi migrants who weren’t so aware of the process for obtaining papers.  In asking what the process was we discovered that it was important first to obtain fake papers, then find a job, stay in that job for a certain amount of time, collect some pay slips and then come to the union, who would then be able to help with their case for a work permit.  The union was able to draw on the conditions set out in circulaire de regularisation to make the case for regularisation, even where workers were working with fake papers.

By offering a service to undocumented workers, in spite of its service-based appearance, the union aims to identify and call out poor employer practices and force them to apply regulations. The broader political goal is to fight illegal work, prevent social dumping and to encourage self-organising and future mobilisations of sans papiers.  The union also hopes for the greater integration and involvement of thesans papiers within the wider union.  Whether trade unions are able to build and sustain this kind of solidarity and action remains a key challenge, but an important one in such uncertain times.

Dr Heather Connolly is Senior Lecturer in Leicester Business School at De Montfort University, and a member of CURA

Social Exclusion and Labour Rights in the Banlieues of Paris

The terrorist attacks in Paris have again highlighted the problem of social divisions in France and the extent to which they lead to feelings of exclusion that in some way incite violent responses. It appears that some of the terrorists grew up in or had links to the banlieues (or suburbs) of Paris, where there are high concentrations of immigrants and minority ethnic groups, as well as high levels of unemployment and poverty and a recent history of racial tensions. Many of the youth in the banlieues are unemployed, with the unemployment rate for immigrant youth above 30% according to the OECD. More generally, migrants and their children are also over-represented in low qualified jobs, with workers of North African origins experiencing the highest ethnic penalty in terms of access to employment.

France has a republican model of integration, built on the universalist values of the 1789 Revolution of secularism and equal individual rights for all. Recognition of cultural difference or ethnic communities is considered unacceptable. In contrast to the British multiculturalist model, where ‘difference’ – whether of ethnicity or religion – is tolerated or even prized, ‘difference’ in France is seen as a form of sectarianism and a threat to the republic. The French notion of laïcité, dating back to the Revolution, actively blocks religious interference in affairs of state and public manifestations of religious identity in public spaces, including workplaces. The problem for the recent generations of Muslim immigrants to France is that the proclaimed universalism of republican values – and the focus on assimilation – has meant that many Muslims feel that, if they want to be ‘French’, they must learn to be citizens of the republic first and Muslims second. This is a difficult and, for some, impossible task.

My recent research has looked at how trade unions have responded to migrant and minority workers in France. As context, it should be said that trade unions in France have one of the lowest levels of membership density among OECD countries, with only around 8% of workers being members of a union. Moreover, the union movement is divided along ideological and political lines. It also confronts ideological employers, which means that social dialogue tends to be conflictual and fairly hollow.

However, trade unions in France still have a high level of institutional embeddedness, manifest in the level of collective bargaining attained with over 90% of workers covered by some form of collective agreement. They also benefit from relatively high levels of worker turnout in workplace representative elections which are organised every 2-4 years. Elected worker representatives participate and negotiate at all levels of the organisation and enjoy a legal framework for employee representation that is the envy of trade unions in the UK, including a right to strike enshrined in the French constitution.

My previous work on French trade unions has shown that the institutional embeddedness of trade unions gives them access to resources (time, space and financing) that allows them to represent the wider interests of workers and mount campaigns to organise workers who are excluded from regulated spaces, both inside and outside the workplace. The unionisation rate among immigrant workers is only around 2%. However, this figure is based on nationality, not ethnic origin, as ethnic monitoring is not permitted in France. Migrants and their descendants are likely to be counted as ‘nationals’ as soon as they access French citizenship. This of course poses problems in terms of how we can study issues of social exclusion and discrimination, as the data needed often doesn’t exist.

What is emerging from my research in France is that trade union behaviour is still fundamentally shaped by the assimilationist model of integration. For migrants and minorities working in France this has generally meant that they have had to leave their ethnic and religious identities at the factory gates, the office door and even the picket line. One trade union activist to whom I spoke about Muslim workers taking part in a strike said that there was a ‘time for everything’ and added that he had told Muslim workers that praying on the picket line was not appropriate. There was no issue with the workers being Muslim; only the public demonstration of religious identity.

Attitudes have been changing, however, as evidenced in the debates on the wearing of headscarves. In a recent case where a woman was fired for refusing to remove the veil when asked to do so by her employer, trade unions supported the court’s decision which allowed women to wear the headscarf when working for private employers and thus not involved in providing public services. There has also been some recognition and support by trade unions for workers discriminated against on the basis of nationality and immigrant status in the past. This was the case recently when 800 Moroccan workers, working on private contracts for the public railways since the 1970s, won a case of discrimination, as they had been excluded from the benefits and status of the public-sector workers alongside whom they worked.

Even though they still approach the issue from a mainly race-blind and social rights perspective, trade unions have made attempts to integrate undocumented migrant workers who have been excluded from accessing their labour rights. Trade unions in and around Paris have done a lot of campaigning around and organising of the sans papiers workers, a large number of whom are of African origin. Ever since the 1970s trade unions have been in favour of the regularisation of undocumented workers and from the early 2000s onwards organised mass strikes of these workers to demand regularisation and respect for their labour rights. As a result, over 5,000 workers have been regularised in recent years and the campaigns continue, with greater numbers of undocumented workers organising campaigns themselves with the support of the trade unions.

This brings me back to the terrorist attacks in Paris and the subsequent discussions around social exclusion. There surely now exists a double challenge for trade unions to act as a force for integration for socially excluded members of society. Firstly, migrant and minority workers tend to work either in the margins or not at all, which means trade unions find it difficult to access and represent them. Secondly, the denial of ethnic and racial differences means that structural and institutional forms of discrimination and exclusion are ignored or not explicitly addressed, which can easily lead to a lack of engagement with the trade union movement on the part of workers who feel they have to suppress their core identities.

By contrast, the successes of the sans papiers campaign shows that trade unions can organise in sectors with high concentrations of migrants and minority workers and can demand labour rights for those working and living on the margins of society. France needs its trade unions to build on this example.

This blog is also published on Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute’s (SPERI) blog.

Dr Heather Connolly is Senior Lecturer in Leicester Business School at De Montfort University and a member of the Contemporary Research on Organisations, Work and Employment (CROWE) group and the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA).