Regimes of Hospitality : Urban Citizenship between Participation and Securitization – the Case of the Multiethnic French Banlieue

Abstract

This thesis analyzes various local development policies in Europe’s big urban areas. 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. The empirical work concerns two sites in the greater metropolitan area of Paris, Le Franc-Moisin–Bel-Air in Saint-Denis and Les Cinq Quartiers in Les Mureaux. 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. I claim that the results from this process are “regimes of hospitality”

Hospitality and hostility: The dilemmas of intimate life and refugee hosting

“…This special section aims to illuminate the emergence of hospitality and hostility in a contemporary era of globalised migration encounters and fraught border regimes (De Genova, 2016), illegality (Andersson, 2014; Khosravi, 2010), the securitisation of migration (Squire, 2015), moral arguments for migration rights (Maboloc, 2020), decolonisation of asylum (Picozza, 2021), and regimes of hospitality and governing citizenship (Foultier,2015). These intersecting discourses and practices constitute those seeking better and safer lives as strangers, aliens, racialised immigrants, undocumented refugees, foreign beggars and other displaced subjects who are in transit and/or without a home as ‘guests’ – albeit unwanted ones.…”