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This paper analyses the programme of redeveloping housing estates in France overseen by the Agence Nationale de la Rénovation Urbaine (ANRU). Under this programme social housing reconstruction is undertaken in a nationally coordinated fashion in order to 'valorize', 'secure' and socially 'mix' estates. The paper highlights the political and neo-colonial aspects of this programme and the wider state spatial strategies it is part of. Redevelopment projects not only further gentrifying land-rent valorization, state rescaling and territorially stigmatizing symbolic violence; they also reorganize territorial relations of domination in multiple, also racialized, neo-colonial and partly hegemonic ways. In a longer view, they respond to the 'urban revolution' of 1968 (Garnier) and to the 'anti-colonial revolution' of independence and anti-racist movements (Khiari). The paper builds on a framework that articulates marxist (Lefebvrean) and anti-colonial (Fanonian) lineages while drawing on research on the neo-colonial aspects of the French state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a translation of key texts by the contemporary Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR) and its key intellectuals: Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja. Following Khiari, post-colonial situations are best understood as recompositions: territorially mediated re-articulations of colonial pasts with other social relations. To respond to the complexities of this post-colonial recomposition, MIR propose an ambitious politics of 'autonomy' and 'mixity'. 'Autonomy' (externally in relationship to the state and organized politics and internally for feminist groups) is seen as an indispensable precondition for a socio-politically mixed, and potentially universalizing, political formation politics. More counter-colonial than post-colonial in orientation (Hallward), MIR attempt to give direction to three decades of revolt emanating from France's racialized popular neighbourhoods, including the uprising of 2005. I argue that MIR's interventions take up themes from the analyses by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire to make countercolonial critique 'live' in France today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws from ethnographic research on a recently built park in one of Paris' predominately West African and Maghrebi districts. It demonstrates how urban design is used to 'build-in' neoliberal subjectivities to the city. This design approach appropriates a tradition of street democracy held by neighborhood associations and redirects their disproportionately middle class, French membership into managerial roles traditionally held by municipal agencies. This neoliberal political subjectivity, which I term vigilant citizenship, makes monitoring and controlling the social composition of the urban commons a form of civic engagement for middle class urbanites. In Paris, this vigilance is fueled by anxieties over the presence of West African and Maghrebi youth in public spaces. Activists do not passively adopt this neoliberal role; they strike a delicate balance as gatekeepers, weighing inclusion against an expectation to maintain a 'successful' public space conforming to a republican model of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]