To browse Academia. Striving to understand the respective places accorded to the measures to increase the participation of the inhabitants on the one hand, and to improve for security and public peace in the context of social and territorial policies on the other, I examine how urban policies define models of urban citizenship. It consists of an analysis of public documents as well as a series of interviews and observations.
This methodological approach serves to gain an understanding of how participative and security procedures emerge in the history of French urban policy and how these norms interact locally. By investigating the overlap of security politics and participatory devices, I demonstrate that deprived areas do not have access to an adequate form of intervention to meet the expectations and needs of its inhabitants, who are squeezed between a logic of development reluctantly accepted by, but rarely negotiated with its inhabitants, and a logic of security that often leads to the confinement of residents to their respective areas.
The thesis thus demonstrates how institutional interventions in multiethnic areas can fuel feelings of suspicion be-tween local stakeholders and civic distrust. Indeed, the participatory procedures that are developed in urban strategies influence the conduct of participants on matters of identity and belonging and can intensify socio-ethnic stigmatization. This effect provides me with a critical standpoint on new techniques of government. The local partners of the state develop daily routines in urban strategies that contribute to articulating participatory devices and security procedures.
Now, more than 40 years after the publication of The Right to the City, it is clear that inequalities, conflicts and injustices in public spaces have not declined. An important part of the global urban population, both north and south, continues to be sidelined from urban amenities. Urban production tends to be directed by logics of enclosure and exclusivity Donzelot, , being fragmented into a multitude of enclaves, hence classifying individuals according to their social status.
Some minorities have ever less access to public spaces, whether they are the homeless Mitchell, ; Zeneidi-Henry, , street vendors Crossa, , prostitutes Hubbard, or youth Malone, Moreover, the idea of being a citizen has made way for that of being a consumer, as pointed out by Santos Introduction to the special issue « Whose right to the city?
