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The traditional industrial cities of Europe face a decline in the industries on which their wealth was built. The conference concerning the issue was held at Lille, France in May 1992. The first conference theme concerned the type of industrial activity likely to promote economic modernization in traditional industrial cities. The traditional industrial regions of Europe remain characterized beyond their differences by disarticulated productive structures. They face two challenges, technological modernization of their productive apparatus and catching up on the technological and scientific gap, their research and development potential remaining high. There should be emphasis on the implementation of policies focusing an integrative approach to the rearticulation of the productive structure. The papers on the second theme, networks and polarization, focused on new forms of spatial economic organization and the emergence of the network paradigm in place of the traditional concept of urban hierarchy. Two spatial trends were referred to, concentration-polarization and specialization of urban space and the emergence of network-like structures between firms and between towns whose effects on the spatial functioning of agglomerations need to be studied. The third conference theme was urban policy and the opposition between competitive urban renewal and global social regulation.

The article provides information about the conference on cities in the era of a flexible production held in Lille, France in March 1994. The research agenda of the conference was partly based on the outcomes of important French research programs on territorial and urban aspects of new forms of organization of productive systems. A new articulation between production and reproduction, the transformation of the urban society and the modes of regulation and reproduction of urban social relations is necessary. The scientific agenda of the conference was also inspired by the research themes of at least four European networks. The objective of the conference was to evaluate the state of the art of the analysis of contemporary relationships between urban society and the productive system.

This paper, written before 13 March 1977 describes the issues at stake in the municipal elections in France—considering the general political situation, the evolutions in the right and left coalitions and the more specific consequences to be expected on urban policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This essay offers a reflexive return to two research projects to demonstrate the value of Bourdieu's emphasis on the symbolic for the analysis of contemporary urban transformation. Bourdieu's insistence that we track the social genesis and diffusion of spatial categories of thought and action directs us to the empirical study of the struggles between agents and organizations that promote and/or oppose these categories, as well as the political, economic and other interests animating the agents. A retracing of the parallel invention of the ‘at‐risk neighborhood’ (quartier sensible) coined for and targeted by French urban policy since the late 1980s and the emergence of ‘historic’ or ‘diverse’ neighborhoods touted by gentrifying residents, cultural organizations and real estate agents in the United States since the 1960s challenges misleading oppositions between materiality and representations that often underpin and cramp urban research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban research often considers densification from the perspective of sustainable development and social mix. This essay focuses instead on the social and political stakes involved in densification through the example of a large French metropolitan area. It shows that the densification policies put in place in the Lyon agglomeration cannot be said to succeed in breaking down the historical segregation between its residential and affluent western suburbs ( banlieues) and its industrial and working-class eastern ones. The political manoeuvres executed by the institutions implementing densification, and the search for consensus characterizing France's intercommunalities, block any possibility of redistributing functions and social classes at the metropolitan scale, and hence of ending the social specialization of Lyon's suburbs. Moreover, municipalities subjected to pressure from suburban areas carefully assess the profile of residents selected to occupy new housing units-i.e. individuals already residing in the commune in the case of western suburbs, and middle-class individuals hailing from the eastern part of the agglomeration in the case of eastern suburbs. Densification does not foster social mix at the metropolitan scale, neither does it improve the housing conditions of disadvantaged populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do households belonging to the middle classes decide to come live in a 'poor' city in the Parisian suburbs? What makes them stay? What are the judgements and strategies that have been brought to bear both individually in their daily lives and as a social group in terms of their collective involvement and their relationships with other social groups? What does this kind of 'social mix' imply in terms of social practices, local and social belonging? This article shows that attitudes towards social mixing have to be considered in terms of their sociological dimensions. This analysis thus takes into account middle-class diversity in socio-residential terms, in terms of trajectories, values and attachment to a particular area. The article also emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between different dimensions of attitudes towards social mixing: depending on the issues at stake, people can accept and sometimes promote a form of cohabitation, or, quite to the contrary, reject it. Finally, the article emphasizes the importance of local contexts and their temporality: for someone belonging to the middle classes, living in a poor city may also mean holding a relatively higher position than elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An enigma lies at the heart of this article. In December 2006, the mayor of Saint- Étienne, Michel Thiollière, was elected as the fifth best mayor in the world by the internet site City Mayors. Yet no publicity was made locally around this award. Taking this anecdote as a starting point, this article deals with the motivations that can lead a city mayor to become involved in urban international relationships' policy (city twinning, participation in cities networks, study trips, etc.). On the one hand these activities provide resources for building up political legitimacy and for electoral control, and on the other they provide resources for policy solutions to urban problems in the public realm. Nevertheless, in a context of transformation of the process of legitimization of urban elected officials, the second kind of resources seems to be the most sought after in mayoral involvement in international activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to show how the governments of two industrial cities in France and the UK have now come to the view that middle-class reinvestment in the city centre offers a solution to urban economic decline, and so have encouraged the middle class to move in by implementing ‘symbolic policies’. Their objective is to transform the image of the post-industrial city through cultural and urban planning policy, in order to adapt it to the supposed taste of potential gentrifiers. This development in strategy results from both external constraints and internal political changes in these cities. The failure of earlier redevelopment strategies is also a factor in explaining this paradoxical phenomenon, in which a social group that is, in fact, almost absent from the central spaces of these cities has now been accorded the status of ‘systematic winners’. Résumé Cet article a pour objectif de montrer comment les gouvernements de deux villes industrielles, en France et en Grande-Bretagne, considèrent désormais que le réinvestissement du centre-ville par les classes moyennes constitue une solution au déclin économique urbain, et en viennent ainsi à favoriser leur arrivée par la mise en oeuvre de «politiques symboliques»: par des actions sur la culture et l'urbanisme, l'objectif est de transformer l'image de la ville postindustrielle pour l'adapter au goût supposé des gentrifieurs potentiels. Cette évolution stratégique est tout à la fois le résultat de contraintes externes et de transformations politiques internes aux villes. L'échec des précédentes stratégies de re-développement est également un facteur explicatif de ce phénomène paradoxal qui rend «systématiquement gagnant» depuis peu un groupe social pourtant quasiment absent de l'espace central de ces villes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do territories change public policies? This would appear to be a rather unusual research orientation. It is even a reversal of the most commonly accepted approaches to the study of territorial public action, which tend to look at this issue from the opposite perspective, that is, in examining how public policies affect territories. The municipal reforms that have simultaneously occurred in Québec and France since the late 1990s afford an excellent opportunity to consider this inversion of the issues. To do so, we take as our theme culture and municipal cultural policies. We try to define and understand to what extent there exist in Québec and France retroactive links between municipal restructuring and municipal decisions about cultural facilities and activities and, more generally, municipal cultural intervention in the urban milieu. This comparative analysis of the cases of France and Québec focuses on discourse as well as achievements. First, we look at the changes arising from institutional reforms in the supply of cultural activities, budgets devoted to culture, and cultural policies. We then consider culture as a vector in the construction of a new municipal institution and a new municipal territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses changes to political clientelism and forms of urban government in Naples and in Marseilles in the period from the 1960s to the 2000s. From a socio-historical, comparative perspective I show that, even in two Southern European cities, the expansion of political clientelism does not depend principally on cultural factors, but rather on politico-institutional processes. The generalization of clientelistic relationships and the increase in policies for redistributing resources on the basis of clientelistic criteria go hand in hand with two historical trends that were evident in the 1960s and 1970s. Those decades were a period both of demographic development and of welfare state expansion at both central and local levels, the latter leading to the distribution of public resources to growing masses of individuals and social groups. In this phase, clientelistic redistribution policies promoted the integration and the upward social mobility of sections of the middle classes and some strata of the working classes in the local and national political system. From the late 1970s and early 1980s onwards, however, these policies were less and less able to promote this upward mobility and social integration. The article ends with a favourable account of some of the new urban management policies conducted by new political leaderships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We set out in this article to deepen our understanding of processes of comparative regional governance by investigating two historic regions (Wales and Brittany) in two neighboring European Union states. We offer a framework for analysis that combines criteria drawn from institutions, relationships, identities, political opportunity structures, and environmental constraints and opportunities. If Welsh devolution is above all shaped by the institutional avenues opened in the Government of Wales Act of 1998, regional capacity in Brittany is built upon a dense network of relationships and tested forms of horizontal and vertical linkage. Political opportunity structures are vital for understanding comparative regional dynamics, notably the political space available for the development of a regionalist party, the interlocking of regional and social movements and the structure of incentives for regional players to engage in local, regional, national or European games. The linkage between identity, territory and institutions is primordial for comparing regions, the Wales-Brittany comparison suggesting that politicized identities do not necessarily add value to regional political institutions. Understanding regional governance also requires cognizance of the overarching environment: the importance of constitutional rules, mechanisms of financial transfer, inter-institutional linkages, the capacity of central government to intervene in devolved areas, or the Europeanization of specific policy sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Sport promotes integration': this idea seems to be commonly accepted both in France and in the UK, even though the authorities in each country see the issue of 'ethnic minorities' very differently. This article draws on research based on interviews with the main actors of 'socio-sports' policies in the cities of Lyon and Birmingham and on analysis of consultation procedures and official documents, to show that sport provides a set of symbolic markers that helps the authorities, professionals and 'ethnic minorities' to get their bearings in an uncertain multicultural situation. Although 'ethnic minorities' try to control the direction of sports policies in pursuit of their own objectives, their strategies tend to be 'routinized' around markers legitimized by the authorities in response to the success of certain sporting practices. Sports policies, therefore, promote 'security' of identity for these 'minorities' by 'mapping' their environment using the values and principles of sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I set out to explain cross-national variations between styles of ethnic minority incorporation in the conventional political systems of British and French cities. To this aim, I draw inspiration from, and refine, institutionalist approaches to minority participation. I focus on a comparison of two cases, Birmingham (England) and Lille (France). I construct a parsimonious explanatory framework focused on three institutional factors: central-local relations in each country and local party politics and styles of local government in each city. I argue that these elements combine in different ways in each country to produce different local political environments for the politics of ethnic minorities, thereby shaping patterns of participation and conditioning their success, or absence thereof, in the electoral process of cities. Because of local specificities, my two cases are not entirely representative of other cities, but they provide an illustration of the political processes at work in most cities. In Birmingham, minorities participate successfully in Labour party politics, while in Lille, they are submitted to persistent political exclusion at the hands of a powerful Socialist party machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that the cultural economy is defined in terms of a set of sectors ranging from certain traditional artisanal industries like clothing or jewelry on the one side, to newer media industries like sound recording or television program production on the other. This article provides an overview of the industrial dynamic of French society since the second world war and assesses its inimical effects on segments of the cultural economy. An empirical description of the cultural-products industries of Paris is offered, with special reference to their locational structure and their competitive advantages and disadvantages.

This article discusses the origins and research themes of the Programme Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur la Ville (PIR Villes), a research initiative launched in France, with particular emphasis on urban public policy. In early 1992 a number of bodies took the initiative to create an interdisciplinary research program on cities, entitled the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). It can be seen that the program not only brings together the body responsible for basic research and the main agencies of urban planning, but also creates bridges between the different technical ministries specializing in urban issues which had allegedly developed in an isolated way. The presence of the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations is due to its role as one of the main sources of loans for the construction of social housing, and, through its subsidiaries, as one of the main banks for local collectives. Apparently, the creation of the PIR Villes initiative is linked to the crisis of the suburbs in France, but its birth also results from a desire to overcome the division which has existed in France between two types of research. On the one hand, from the 1960s, the technical ministries responsible for planning and housing policies gradually developed their own research capacities. On the other hand, over the same period, the CNRS had developed a body of research which directly or indirectly addressed the same questions.

The article concentrates on emigration from the Caribbean islands. The specific goal is to examine the origins and early workings of the organized migration policy during the 1960s, the bedrock upon which these movements have been built. It has three principal aims: first, to set these flows in the broader contexts of Caribbean emigration and of French immigration; second, to trace the origins of the state institutional framework of migration during the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the setting up of the migration agency, the Bureau for Migration from the Overseas Departments and opposition to it; and, third, to assess the early workings of the policy through the records of individual migrants. Of the many migrant flows to metropolitan France since the Second World War, perhaps the least discussed is that from the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. This is partly because the status of the islands as overseas departments, bestows on their inhabitants French nationality and unrestricted freedom of movement. The migrants cannot properly be considered within the general, and currently heated, debate on foreign immigrants

This article focuses on analysis of the political aspects of the grant property allocation process in France. Although the general historical trend in France, as in other countries, is towards a bureaucratization of transfer systems, by which more and more of finding is allocated through automatic procedures, the question of the role of political processes in grant distribution remains an important open question, subject to different evaluations. This now enables the researchers to test the main hypotheses put forward in previous research work. Before outlining these hypotheses and the results of the study--a brief introduction to the main characteristics of the grant allocation system in France is provided. The study shows that some traditional political resources such as cumul des mandats and the personal relational networks' of the mayors are efficient in obtaining more money from the central state or from the department or region. A more contentious conclusion to set against past theoretical assertions is provided by the analysis of the relations between the political tendency of mayors and the amount of block grant they received.

It is no easy matter to produce a history of ideas. It is even less easy to write the history of one's own generation and yet for some years now urban research, whether inspired by marxism, radicalism or merely the spirit of criticism and which has had such an influence on the 1970's has now in turn become an object of study. But the fact that it is time to draw up the balance sheet means that an era is coming to a close. Clearly the golden period of urban research has ended in France and perhaps, generally speaking, in all comparable industrial countries. Thus, aims of research as they have been defined up until now appear already to belong to the past. The growth of urban areas and old industrial regions, which, it was believed, would continue indefinitely, has been replaced by recession. The planning system, which developed since the start of the century, along with the welfare state, has collapsed. Social movements, which have been customarily described as urban have become weaker.

The beginning of legal town planning in France is commonly dated back to the period 1919-1924. The acts which were adopted at the time made official a view of town plans which attempted to encompass a whole series of specific policies — environmental improvement via public art, the regulation of road provision, the sanitation of existing blocks and the setting up of new districts. The principle of making town-planning programmes compulsory was first discussed by the French Chamber of Deputies in 1909, on the basis of ideas put forward by social reformers and experts in architecture and public health. The projects were proposed there by members of parliament, who belonged to the center and center-left. But as the issue of town planning was linked from the start to the issue of the reform of compulsory purchase, increasing the powers of the communes and the government, the adoption of these projects was deferred from year to year until the war. Various measures, which were welcomed by a first generation of French town planners as though they were opening up a new era and bringing about a break with the past, have left but very faint traces today and had almost no impact.

Industrial policy is a major issue in the political debate in France, as in most developed capitalist countries facing crisis. In this tentative process of social change, however, emerging economic practices have to cope with the heritage of former policies of the state and private firms. This heritage prevents a completely new start. Rather it constitutes an economic and ideological thread woven throughout the whole social structure. The first part of the article is devoted to a brief description of this heritage, of industrial decline among other things, and some of its consequences. The later parts consider the local consequences of and responses to industrial decline and restructuring. Local authorities, mainly left-wing ones, have played a supporting role, but also have been tempted to develop more direct interventions to stimulate economic activity, with all the ambiguities of such policies, particularly regarding their fiscal consequences. The new national policy is giving local authorities more responsibilities, and also greater possibilities for economic intervention and for negotiation with nationalized firms and banks and central administrations.

This article focuses on the political party Left Wing local government and services policy in France. French local authorities appear to be responsible for making available a large number of local services, from primary schools to cultural facilities to garbage disposal. They are officially responsible for providing building and managing--many of them and they play a very important role in theft financing, more important than that of the central state. In the communist municipalities, all of them governed in coalition with the socialists, there has been less conflict than in the socialist ones, and with more limited consequences. The socialists have only ever abandoned the coalition voluntarily and only in a very limited number of cases. But difficulties between the parties are potentially more acute when the first trend is present, although they may be particularly so when their, forces are closely balanced electorally, and the socialists hope to make gains over the communists. This trend has mainly developed in the newly elected communist municipalities, where the left wing local governments follow years of political fights against the former right wing ones, and face a crisis situation with very limited resources.

This article examines the French environmental movement as a product of two main structures of French political life: the centralized French technocratic state and the major parties as they exist in the current phase of French politics. The expansion of the state into new areas of life, and the failure of the political parties to act as intermediaries between national governments and citizenry, to serve as channels for organized conflict resolution, has stimulated the proliferation of citizens' groups which, deliberately bypass the parties and the state to articulate demands for better environmental quality. It is this failure of traditional political institutions that has generated what the author argues to be in the eyes of French analysts a particularly American solution, and in the eyes of American political analysts a very French solution. It is American in that it seeks to avoid questions of class, class-consciousness and collective versus private ownership of the means of production, and in that it is avowedly antistatist. It is French in that it has very quickly gone beyond a focus on site preservation, on reducing pollution, nuisance, disamenity, and other negative externalities to focus on restructuring French society in fundamental ways and that the route towards that social restructuring is political.

The environment can be analyzed by studying those who use it directly as consumers: road users, customers of collective facilities, town-dwellers, all of them have actual or potential demands to express to the private and public authorities who are in charge of producing and managing, socialized spaces. But it may be asked whether these demands are generated and structured by obvious needs, to be defined in economic terms of passive and individualized consumption. Current scientific material on the subject of industrial pollution proves to be rather scanty, at least in France, if taken in the narrow sense of specific trade union policies and practices relating to the environment. Although declarations of trends and political statements have increased over the last ten years at trade union confederation level, workers' initiatives in this area operate mainly at the enterprise level or, more rarely, in an exchange between a section of the firm, the local factory and a federation. It is premature to suggest a typology for in fact reactions vary from one place to another according to many criteria: political stage, urban zone, eases in the identification of the firm which is generating particularly high pollution levels or a particularly serious danger, etc. However, it would be interesting to see whether there is a correlation between the kind of wage-earning class concerned and its sensitivity to environmental problems.

The article discusses the history of day-care policy for working class women in France. The dominant ideology of women's primary maternal role has meant an emphasis upon charity and the provision of day-care services. Some hold that domestic labor produces exchange value, which is paid through the husband's wages, whereas others think, to the contrary, that domestic labor has no exchange value since within the family there is no direct relationship with capital. When family day care is the expressed preference, it appears more frequently with unskilled or semi skilled mothers. In direct contrast to preferences, it is the most frequently used type of child care for all occupational groups. State regulation of day-care services for building subsidies and accreditation controls is exercised through departmental agencies of the Health Ministry, the Direction d&eacutepartementale de I'action sanitaire et sociale (DDASS). Either accredited or non-accredited child minders who take care of children in their own homes carry out the majority of day care. Conflicts between male and female workers arise from the priority attached to day-care issues in union negotiations