Les relations interculturelles dans la ville : entre fictions et mutations

Abstract

The Intercultural Relations in the City : Between Fictions and Mutations Sophie BODY-GENDROT and Véronique DE RUDDER In France, as in the United States or in the United Kingdom, according to an already worn out rhetoric, the conflation of « neighbourhoods in crisis » and of social pathologies is expressed in stereotyped discourses reinforcing the joint stigmatisation of segregated residential spaces and of their residents. The impact of economic restructuring and of globalization produces however contradictory outputs on the formation of identities, such as the fragmentation and the fluidity of their daily expression in local interactions and the hardening of more general, national, even civilisational identifications. As boundaries and social cleavages crystallize, the disadvantaged populations from bleak areas are involved into stakes around social hierarchies revealed throughout interethnic and racial conflicts. Public policies related to these urban spaces vary according to national traditions and administrative choices and the intervention of the state, in particular, may be rather different. They converge in the three concerned countries, however, in the use of minor, sometimes inadequate, and often contradictory tools to treat major cases of economic and social collapse, while hardly offering any solution allowing a genuine revamping of the status of such spaces nor a real socio-political integration of their residents.

France Upside Down over a Head Scarf?*

“…It is a racism without race, a cultural racism hidden under a public discourse on social disinte gration. In distressed urban areas, suspicion becomes generalized among genera tions of different origin and mutual avoidance the rule (Body-Gendrot and de Rudder 1998). Alienated residents, whether old stock French, second genera tions, or even state agents working in derelict areas, share acute problems of social stigmatization and, as a consequence, establish bright boundaries between individuals and groups.…”