Revitalizing Deprived Neighborhoods through « Social Mixing » Strategies?

Urban Renewal Program in Paris Suburban Areas

Abstract

 This article aims to analyze the effects produced by "social mixing" urban policy on the relationships between inhabitants in local society, based on the example of the "Urban Renewal Program" in the declining working-class neighborhood of Aubervilliers （Seine-Saint-Denis, France）.

 The French urban policy for the improvement of deprived neighborhoods, that had been focused on social development through empowerment of inhabitants in the 1980s, was increasingly replaced by strategies established to abandon deprived social housing and reconstruct new type of housing for the middle classes, in order to facilitate social mixing and a greater diversification of the populations.

 However, our survey shows that, despite the demolition of defamed social housing complex and the programs of housing diversification, most of the socially handicapped inhabitants remain on the same site, while the new middle class people do not really settle in the neighborhood as expected by policy makers.

 Rather than achieving the two self-proclaimed goals of the "social mixing" - reducing the concentration of poverty and attracting the middle class to the renovated neighborhood -this urban program has resulted in the division of the population in various separate and distinctive fractions, an increased feeling of social class differences among the inhabitants, and the weakening of the social cohesion in the local community.