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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]