The Cités Strike Back: Restive Responses to Territorial Taint in the French Banlieues

Abstract

Territorial stigmatisation in France is produced and enacted through a wide range of agencies: the media, political and policy discourses, academic debates on the alleged ‘ghettoisation’ of French outer city, and the official ‘urban policy’ of the central government. This paper departs from research seeking to analyse the production and diffusion of these disparaging images by focusing on the perspective and reactions of the bearers of the stigma. Drawing on 18 months of field observation in two defamed housing estates in Nîmes, in Southern France, I question the thesis of the wholesale internalisation of negative representations by residents of the banlieues. I propose instead that their perceptions of stigma are deeply ambivalent, as evidenced by their abiding attachment to place. Mindful of the danger of romanticising the subaltern, I argue that many transgressions of the norms of dominant society are ways of deflecting and displacing the language of spatial stigma.