Mustafa Dikeç
email: mdikec@yahoo.com

Police, politics, and the right to the city

Keywords: urban policy, injustice, politics, right to the city, space, spatial justice, urban spatial sensibility

Space and spatiality have recently been at the core of debates concerning the political possibilities of the city. The arguments advanced in this paper might be seen as an attempt to contribute to these debates through a reflection on the spatiality of (in) justice, politics, and the right to the city. The case of French urban policy, with its focus on distressed urban areas, and the 'suburban problem' in France are used as examples to make arguments more concrete.

Introduction

French urban policy was launched in the early 1980s following a series of incidents in the peripheral areas of some large French cities. It consisted of several measures which were then regrouped under the generic name la politique de la Ville (PV, hereafter) in 1988. Conceived as the 'spatialization of social policies', the objective of the urban policy program was to identify and intervene in 'neighborhoods in difficulty' ('quartiers en difficulté'), most of which were located in the banlieues. The French suburb (banlieue) has different characteristics than the American suburb, and connotes distressed social conditions like American inner-city areas. Located in peripheral urban areas, most with deteriorating public housing, suburbs have been a constant issue on the public agenda, especially since the early 1980s.

Suburbs have also been the major focus of urban policy programs, being a priority issue for successive governments since the early-1980s. They have been constituted as objects of intervention under urban policy, which was based on the spatial delimitation and designation of 'neighborhoods in difficulty' or 'priority neighborhoods'. My aim in this paper is to problematize this spatial conceptualization, and to argue that such a spatial focus is a narrow one that overlooks larger dynamics, and that it has significant political implications for the inhabitants living in designated intervention areas. In advancing these arguments, I will try to demonstrate that the major source of the problems in such designated areas lies in the economic crisis of the early-1970s and economic restructuring processes of the following two decades. I will then examine the discursive articulation of designated areas as problems, and try to point to the political implications of such articulations. Before doing these, however, a brief explanation about the origins and major features of urban policy might be helpful to provide some background.

French urban policy

The origins of urban policy go back to the first Housing and Social Life plan of 1977 (Habitat et vie sociale, HVS), which was originally conceived to address the problems of large social housing estates (grands ensembles) built in the 1960s, showing signs of degradation in the 1970s. The grand ensemble was a quick, cheap, and large-scale response to address the housing problem in the post-war urbanization period. They were built mostly at the peripheries of cities where land was available and cheap. They definitely contributed to the improvement of the lives of many families with their large surfaces, central heating and bathrooms and toilets. These housing estates initially did not accommodate poor groups; rather, they had inhabitants with stable incomes. By the end of the 1960s, each city, regardless of its size, had at least one neighborhood composed of such housing estates [START_REF] Jaillet | La politique de la ville, une politique incertaine[END_REF].

These neighborhoods, however, were far from the city centers, and under-equipped. Most of them suffered from the lack of adequate public transportation, shops, social amenities, and physical degradation due largely to the use of cheap construction materials and rapid construction techniques. The housing finance reform of 1977 (aide à la personne, APL) gave push to middle class populations, who were growing more and more dissatisfied by the living conditions in these areas. The main objective of this reform was to facilitate owner-occupied housing. Those having the financial means took advantage of this reform, and moved out from these areas. They were replaced by socio-economically weaker groups -groups with unstable resources and/or immigrants, who were hardly welcome by the property market in the city. Moreover, rising unemployment exacerbated the problems in these areas, which would then, as we will see below, become the 'priority neighborhoods' of urban policy. An inter-ministerial committee for housing and social life, the HVS, was established in 1977 in order to address these emerging problems. Fifty sites were chosen, and the main concern was with housing renovation. The degradation of the social housing stock (HLM), therefore, was the main concern of the 1977 HVS program, which sought to address the problems in these areas through physical amelioration. The HVS program, however, was too centralized, implying neither local elected representatives nor inhabitants, content often with redoing a 'new skin' to buildings without really ameliorating the comfort of living conditions, and with extra 'coloring' of the facades, which increase the growing or already affirmed stigma from which these neighborhoods suffer (Jaillet, 2000, p. 31). It is also possible to point to the limits of the HVS program by focusing on its spatial conception. The program not only identified problems with a narrow spatial focus, but proposed solutions as well. The deterioration of the HLM stock was only one side of a complex problem however, which had to be addressed in ways that went beyond an exclusive focus on physical amelioration. A more global approach was needed.

The inception of urban policy was not merely a recognition of the limits of the HVS program, and an attempt to overcome them by increasing the extent of policies to include social issues as well. Urban policy was conceived following the incidents of social unrest in the summer of 1981 -referred to as 'hot summer' -that took place in the suburbs of Lyons, a few months after the arrival of the Socialist government to power. These suburbs had a huge social housing stock, and contained a large proportion of foreign population and second generation immigrants.

The first program, Social Development of Neighborhoods, started in 1982. It was conceived as an experimental program, with a limited number of sites. Initially 16 neighborhoods were selected for this first phase of urban policy. The particular spatial conceptualization of urban policy had thus started. That is, neighborhoods were spatially delineated and designated as having problems; it was assumed that solutions to the perceived problems lay neatly in the designated area.

The number of neighborhoods were raised to 23 the following year, and to 148 in 1984. Towards the end of the decade, and in the early-1990s, urban policy was institutionalized with an assignment of a minister, who was to address a problem officially defined as 'exclusion'; the number of neighborhoods included was raised to 546. It is also in this period that the term 'sensitive neighborhoods' ('quartiers sensibles') appeared to designate the priority neighborhoods of urban policy; 'sensitive' because they, allegedly, constituted a threat to public order. The neighborhoods with 'bad reputation' of the early years of urban policy became 'menaces' [START_REF] Ph | L'usage des quartiers. Action publique et géographie dans la politique de la ville (1989-1998[END_REF], shifting from being neighborhoods 'in difficulty' or 'in danger' to 'dangerous neighborhoods' [START_REF] Bonelli | Des quartiers en danger aux "quartiers dangereux[END_REF]. The spatial imagery, in this process, remained the same, based on the delimitation of neighborhoods mostly in suburbs. Today, there are some 1,300 neighborhoods spatially delimited and designated as the 'priority neighborhoods' of urban policy programs.

Despite changing governments, initiation of new measures (such as enterprise zones since 1996), numerous reports, dozens of acronyms to designate urban policy programs, and millions spent, three things remained the same in the two decades of urban policy. First, the spatial conceptualization of problems remained unchanged, and based on the delimitation and designation of neighborhoods, mostly in the suburbs. Second, although urban policy was announced as a priority issue for governments both from the Left and the Right, its achievements remained rather modest with regard to its announced ambitions and high publicity. And finally, incidents of social unrest in the suburbs continued, and even increased.

What changed was the discursive articulation of the suburb, where most of the priority neighborhoods of urban policy were located. The priority neighborhoods of urban policy were qualified with names such as 'neighborhoods in difficulty', 'sensitive neighborhoods', 'neighborhoods of exile', 'outlaw zones', and 'gray zones' -a term which, before being used to designate suburbs, was used by intelligence services to designate uncontrolled regions in the Amazon that were used by producers and dealers of cocaine (Collovald, 2001, p. 108;fn.30). This constant discursive articulation of the suburb resulted in the consolidation of an image of the suburb as a 'threat', closely associated with a feeling of insecurity and a fear of immigration [START_REF] Rey | La peur des banlieues[END_REF]. This image has also been accompanied by a discourse on the 'malaise' and 'crisis' of suburbs. 'Malaise of suburbs', 'suburbs in crisis', and 'suburban crisis' have become commonly used terms to talk about suburbs, both in the media (see, for example, [START_REF] Bonelli | Des quartiers en danger aux "quartiers dangereux[END_REF][START_REF] Collovald | Des desordres sociaux a la violence urbaine[END_REF][START_REF] Macé | Le traitement médiatique de la sécurité[END_REF], and in the policy discourse (see, for example, [START_REF] Laplanche-Servigne | La construction des politiques de la ville dans les débats parlementaires français. Peut-on faire le bonheur des gens ordinaires malgré eux?[END_REF][START_REF] Baudin | Banlieues à problèmes. La construction d'un problème social et d'un thème d'action publique[END_REF]. Thus, starting in the 1980s, the suburb -in crisis -has constantly been represented, both in the urban policy discourse and the media, 1 as the city's Other that, as Mitterrand once put it, lacked 'order and urbanity'.

The 'Suburban Crisis'

But does the 'suburban crisis' exist in France? It is possible, I believe, to answer the question in the negative, that the so-called suburban crisis does not exist as such, and this for two reasons. The first is simply because the suburb does not exist as such, and second, the 'crisis', if there is one, is a larger social and spatial one. Asserting that something that has been one of the major preoccupations of policy-makers and the larger public for two decades does not exist demands, reasonably, some explanation.

What is at issue is the larger city-region and not simply the suburb. What is at issue, in other words, is a form of spatialization that renders certain areas and their inhabitants socio-economically and politically vulnerable. Not only the neighborhoods of the urban policy program, but also their cities have been the most dramatically touched areas of the restructuring processes of the early 1980s. What one observes in these neighborhoods is a sharp inequality compared to their surrounding city-regions. There is good reason to believe that there are structural reasons for such inequalities. For the 1990-1999 period, for example, the level of unemployment in the 'priority neighborhoods' of the urban policy program increased three times more (from 18.9% to 25.4%) than the level of unemployment for the rest of the country (from 10.8% to 12.8%), despite the fact that these neighborhoods have been the object of policy interventions for a decade or even more in many cases. Furthermore, it is quite curious to see the same neighborhoods in the 'priority neighborhoods' lists of the PV; the list has practically remained the same since the early 1990s, with certain neighborhoods being included since the early 1980s. The reasons for such increases in unemployment are no secret. The economic crisis following the oil crisis in the 1970s was influential in rising unemployment rates. The major change, however, was brought by the intense economic restructuring processes of the 1980s and 1990s, which translated into sharp declines in the manufacturing sector after the relocation of firms in parts of the world that were economically more profitable. There were 4.6 million people employed in the manufacturing sector (construction not included) in France in 1989, and half a million of these jobs were lost from 1989 to 1994 (OECD, 1998). This trend was aggravated even further with technological advances and the development of new service sectors, increasing the demand for more skilled labor than was already available following the losses in the manufacturing sector. Many working class quartiers, most of which today are urban policy's priority quartiers, were hit severely by unemployment ensuing largely from plant closures in manufacturing and industrial sectors.

The problems that most of the inhabitants of suburb face are not problems of the suburb, because the larger societal problems of racism and xenophobia go well beyond the confines of the suburb. The spatial confinement of 'the problem' (i.e. suburban crisis), I believe, conceals the structural dynamics of the city-region and larger societal problems.

I would like to argue, furthermore, that the suburban crisis does not exist. Crisis is a notion that claims exceptionality. The dissensus of the inhabitants of certain suburbs (with one fourth -or even more -of the active population unemployed) where incidents of social unrest occurred, it might be held, has nothing exceptional except, perhaps, the ways in which dissensus is manifested (e.g. setting cars on fire), which no longer surprises anyone 2 . It is, therefore, possible to suspect that the exceptional quality of the term crisis has been used to legitimize repressive measures taken towards the suburb 3 , and that the question, in fact, is a question of alterity, of a confrontation of different, and often times antagonistic, identities, which is the very feature of everyday urban life. If I am correct in this interpretation, it is possible to argue that the PV has functioned largely as a policy of containment; first, by legitimizing repressive measures and surveillance techniques 4 , and second, by turning political claims into disturbances. In other words, by turning voices into noises. And this displacement of dissensus owes much to the hegemony of a consensual ideology, to a blend of French republicanism and neo-liberal urbanism (see, for example, Estèbe, 2001).

The question "Does the 'suburban crisis' exist in France?" is not merely a rhetorical question. It is possible to answer the question in the negative through a different conception of space and politics, and through taking into consideration processes, rather than focusing exclusively on forms. When seen from this perspective, the question ceases to be one of 'crisis of the suburb' as such, and becomes, rather, a question of injustice produced and reproduced by social and spatial dynamics. The question, in other words, becomes one of the structural dynamics of domination and oppression with the production of space at its core.

My argument thus far has been that this particular spatialization with distressed areas in the suburbs is yet another manifestation of the uneven geographies of capitalism, sustaining, if not increasing, inequalities between areas that are considered to be in crisis and their larger city-regions. In the following section, I will consider the political implications of this exclusive focus on the suburb as such, which has resulted in the articulation of the suburb as 'threat' both in the media and the policy discourse. I will try to argue that this process, eventually, has led to the 'spatialization of the Other', depriving the inhabitants of certain areas of their rights to the city in the political sense of the term.

Police, politics, and de-politicization

What, then, are the political consequences of this exclusive focus on deprived areas? How, if the assertion is correct, are the inhabitants living in these areas deprived of their political rights to the city? In what follows, I will offer one possible interpretation based on the political thought of Jacques Rancière.

The focus of French urban policy, as I have tried to illustrate above, has always been explicitly on the suburbs, and the problem it was supposed to tackle was defined as 'exclusion'. Its focus, in other words, has always been on 'the excluded'. What is important here is not to overlook the fact that an explicit focus on the excluded, on the part that does not 'fit in', implies an assumption about the 'whole'. The implicitly recognized whole stands for the norm. A whole to be divided (included and excluded), therefore, assumes that it meaningfully exists. This imaginary whole reflects a peculiar idea of society. The fact that it is imaginary, however, does not mean that it is without consequences; it is a representation -a very powerful one -with practical effects:

The idea of society is a powerful image. It is potent in its own right to control or to stir men to action. This image has form; it has external boundaries, margins, internal structure. Its outlines contain power to reward conformity and repulse attack. There is energy in its margins and unstructured areas [START_REF] Douglas | Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo[END_REF][START_REF] Douglas | Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo[END_REF], p. 115). I will call this symbolic whole, following Rancière, the police, not to refer to repressive forces but rather to refer, using the original meaning of the word, to the order of things, of the citythe polis. The police, therefore, refers to the established social order with a process of governing. It refers, in other words, to "a natural order of things where a society is represented as being divided into functions, into places where these functions are exercised, into groups which are, by virtue of their places, bound for exercising this or that function". It is "a structuring of the common space", fixing at once a common space and its exclusive parts, which makes forms of domination appear as if they are founded on a sensible and obvious system. It is a symbolic constitution of the social, and implies "an organic vision of the society" (Rancière, 2000, p. 215). Even politics, in this spatial ordering, has its proper place.

This, however, is not politics, Rancière argues; it simply is confusing politics with the police. There is politics, he maintains, as soon as one leaves "the reference to an organicity of the society or to a naturality of the exercise of the government, the dividing up of places and powers" (2000, p. 215). Politics has no place in this organic order; it always comes as a surplus to the saturated police order. It is the revocation of the very idea that partitioned spaces correspond to partitioned functions, groups, and powers.

Politics proper, therefore, implies a disruption of the police order. One of the ways in which the police avoids the disturbance of politics is to name phenomena and to assign them to their 'proper places' in the established order, and therefore, de-politicize them. And this is exactly what the PV does by focusing on the suburb. The (excluded) suburb is included in the police order: They are the excluded. The suburb legitimizes intervention: Those are the neighborhoods in crisis. Nothing, in fact, escapes the police -especially the 'excluded'. The excluded is now included; the boundaries have been fixed.

Why, then, is this distinction between the police and politics? What is the democratic theme in this particular conception of politics? The democratic theme is not that the police order can be all inclusive. For Rancière, this is not possible. Every order will have its remainders. The democratic theme is to re-define the whole and to speak for this whole; it is making a claim to be the whole, not to be included in the whole. The democratic theme is not the inclusion of the excluded; it is the posture of the redefinition of the whole and its modes of governance and partitioning. Such a posture makes necessary the following two features as to the nature of politics and the police.

First, politics cannot be institutionalized. It is a call of the demos for a new institutionalization. And second, the police has to be non-pejorative since any redefinition of the whole with a process of governing will inevitably lead to the reconstitution of another police order, 'good' or 'bad'. The police, in other words, is not intrinsically 'bad'. There are, however, practices of policing. Going back to the example of inclusion/exclusion: in Rancière's approach, this is not a question of politics; it is about alterations in a police order. 'The inclusion of the excluded' is the wrong way to think politically about the issue; even, for example, exclusion from formal power is a form of inclusion in the police order (e.g., women and slaves in the Greek polis). Politics, therefore, is not about identifying the 'excluded' and trying to include them. The logic of identification belongs to the police. Politics is not, furthermore, about the negotiation of interests by the already identified groups. Politics proper is to question the 'given' order of the police that seems to be the 'natural' order of things, to question the whole and its partitioned spaces, and to verify the equality of any speaking being to any other speaking being [START_REF] Rancière | Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, translated by J. Rose[END_REF].

From this point of view, it is possible to argue that French urban policy, through the spatial delimitation of 'neighborhoods in crisis', displaces dissensus in the police order. First, its exclusive focus on the suburb effaces the synthetically partitioned nature of the whole, and leaves the whole unquestioned (it is the suburb that is in 'crisis', the rest is fine). It thus avoids addressing fundamental antagonisms that are constitutive of the very society and its spaces. Distressed areas -the remainders -are constituted as objects of intervention, objects that seem merely as external to the production processes of urban space. Second, and more importantly, the suburb now has its place in the 'natural' order of things; it is a place from where could only come noises. Things, in other words, happen 'there'; recurrent incidents of social unrest in the French suburbs no longer surprise anyone. What happens in the suburbs no longer sound like voices evoking some form of injustice, but merely as noises coming from their 'proper' places. The excluded is included in the order, with a rigid distinction between 'here' (the City) and 'there' (the suburb). This is the spatial logic behind the PV: it leaves no room for the blurring of boundaries, for 'in-between's since it is guided by a rigid logic of 'here' and 'there'. And this logic can be seen as an attempt to avoid the disturbance of politics through the configuration of certain places -in this case the suburb -as places of noise. The challenge, then, becomes the securing of the order. Transformations in French urban policy in the early 1990s, in this sense, may be exemplary.

The 1990s were marked by the 'return of the State' with the passing of many ambitious laws concerning urban policy (of which the LOV of 1991, known as the 'anti-ghetto' law, was one). Despite attempts to extend the geographical extent of urban policy, the focus still was on neighborhoods showing signs of distress. The Delarue Report was published in 1991, putting distressed neighborhoods under the lens again. Delarue's diagnostic was that these neighborhoods were not only 'in crisis' or 'in difficulty'; they were relegation neighborhoods 5 . The concern, though not always explicitly stated, was "restoring the 'republican order' in places that might become 'outlaw' ['hors droit'] neighborhoods" (Jaillet, 2000, p. 35). This concern, in fact, was evident in the famous speech of President Mitterrand at Bron on 4 December, 1990. 6 Mitterrand stated that "it was possible to design, in this hideous jumble [magma] of suburbs of big cities, an order, an urbanism, an aesthetics, a way of life, and maybe a hope" (emphases added).

Mitterrand was convinced that suburbs, products of State post-war urban planning, were places where 'disorder reigned'. It was the task of the State to bring order and urbanity to these areas. Moreover, 'a new dramaturgy of neighborhoods' had appeared, due largely to the media coverage of incidents of social unrest, "justifying the call to return to security and public order" (Jaillet, 2000, p. 39).

The answer of the French Intelligence Service was to establish a special section on 'Cities and Suburbs' in 1991 that would specialize in 'urban violence'. Two points, at least, are important here. First, the creation of a special section at the French Intelligence Service, Mitterrand's Bron speech, creation of a City Ministry, assignment of prefects to certain regions as the local arms of the central state, and Delarue's 1991 report on suburbs in difficulty as 'relegation neighborhoods' were seemingly all motivated by the incidents of social unrest at the Mas du Taureau neighborhood, Vaulx-en-Velin in the suburbs of Lyons, in October 1990.

But there was more to the early 1990s. There was a zealous effort to restore the republican order, guided by a concern about security because 'there' was now 'here'; incidents of social unrest were not confined to the suburbs. What was decisive in this 'return of the State' in the early 1990s was the recognition of this fact during the manifestation of high school students in November 1990 in Paris, which ended up with confrontations with the police. The report of Julien Dray, presented at the National Assembly following the incidents, is telling in this respect. The report is entitled Violence of Young People in the Suburbs, which was, in Dray's words, was 'born out of a shock during the manifestations of high school students in the Fall of 1989'. Dray, therefore, prepares his report on violence of young people in the suburbs by referring to the incidents that took place not in the suburbs but in the middle of Paris (which, in fact, took place not in 1989 but in 1990). The conviction was that it was the young people coming from the suburbs to Paris that caused the incidents during the manifestations. 'They' were now 'here'. This is what was shocking: 'there' was 'here'; the Other out there was threatening the Same here.

These examples, I believe, might be seen as indicative of the ways in which the inhabitants of certain areas are deprived of their right to the city in the political sense of the term through a particular configuration of space -both discursively and concretely. The suburb and its inhabitants have been assigned to their 'proper' places in the police order -in the symbolically constituted social imaginary -as places of noise. The challenge for the state, in this sense, is to secure this order through the effective containment of certain spaces and groups therein, which mostly consist of immigrants and/or people of immigrant extraction.

I would like to argue, however, that the challenge, rather than looking at the malaise of suburbs and to recognize the City as the Same on seeing its Other, is to look at the very city in its totality, at the very society and its space to discover the suburb and to problematize the city. The suburb is not self-contained; its spaces and social relations are not produced in a vacuum. And conceiving the city in its totality is as important as recognizing its diversity.

In this sense, the problem with the PV is that it does not focus on the 'spatiality of problems' (i.e. spatial dynamics and processes that produce and/or reproduce problems); it, rather, turns the question into 'problems in space' and 'problem spaces', and delimits certain areas and fixes identities in space. The 'fixation of identities in space' means that inhabitants of the designated areas are identified by where they live; that is, where they live becomes determinant (often in a negative way) of their identities. The PV, in other words, spatializes the Other. The attempt, I believe, must be to consider how particular forms of spatialization engender and maintain problems, and not merely to identify 'problem spaces'. The PV's spatial focus, therefore, is narrow in the sense that rather than taking into consideration larger spatial dynamics, it delimits certain spaces as if they are points in space, external to the workings of the larger urbanization processes, waiting to be discovered. Such a narrow spatial focus not only ignores larger dynamics of the social production of space and of social relations, but also conceals deep socio-political problems -such as racism and xenophobiaunder space. In other words, deep societal problems are reduced to spatial problems with a Cartesian, static conception of space, neglecting not only social, but spatial dynamics as well.

Spatial strategies, then, may be effective ideological tools for the 'right' order of the police. For this very reason, it is necessary, perhaps, to take space seriously in emancipatory political projects. I would like to conclude by considering some possibilities for imagining spatially conscious politics.

Conclusions: Urban spatial sensibilities 7

The idea of the city has recently instigated a considerable body of literature seeking to think spatially about questions of citizenship, democracy, politics, and (in)justice. It is possible to observe that the current debates around urbanism are structured by issues and concerns that were not, until recently, at the core. Four such issues may easily be discerned in the literature. The list, however, is not exhaustive. The attempt, rather, is to point to certain issues that have not until recently been -although their importance were acknowledged implicitly or explicitly -at the core of debates around 'the urban question'.

The first one of these issues is the recognition of the role space and spatiality plays. The effects of this recognition in the field of geography have been immense, quickly disseminating across a variety of disciplines from anthropology (see, for example, [START_REF] Low | Spatializing culture: the social production and social construction of public space in Costa Rica[END_REF] to political science (see, for example, [START_REF] Magnusson | The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience[END_REF][START_REF] Young | Justice and the Politics of Difference[END_REF][START_REF] Young | Residential segregation and differentiated citizenship[END_REF]. The most widely observed paradigm of this 'spatial turn' is the social constructivist approach to space, with the recognition of the socio-spatial dialectic; that is, a conception of space produced through social relationships, which, in turn, constitutes those very relationships (Gregory and Urry, 1985;Harvey, 1989b;[START_REF] Lefebvre | The Production of Space[END_REF][START_REF] Lefebvre | The Production of Space[END_REF]; [START_REF] Soja | Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory[END_REF][START_REF] Soja | Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andimagined Places[END_REF].

The second issue involves a concern with justice and the various forms of injustice inherent in the workings of the capitalist city [START_REF] Harvey | Social Justice and the City[END_REF][START_REF] Harvey | Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference[END_REF]Merrifield and Swyngedouw, 1997;[START_REF] Smith | Geography and Social Justice[END_REF][START_REF] Soja | Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions[END_REF][START_REF] Dikeç | Justice and the spatial imagination[END_REF]. Such a concern engenders a third issue; that is, considering emancipatory projects informed by a politics of space and the (re)construction of the city as a terrain of spatially informed politics [START_REF] Lefebvre | Reflections on the politics of space[END_REF][START_REF] Massey | Spaces of politics[END_REF][START_REF] Keith | Street sensibility? Negotiating the political by articulating the spatial[END_REF]. Formation of political identities and deliberations on democracy accompany such projects (Keith and Pile, 1993;[START_REF] Massey | Thinking radical democracy spatially[END_REF][START_REF] Tajbakhsh | The Promise of the City: Space, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary Social Thought[END_REF].

Finally, there has been a considerable attempt to reconsider citizenship with a shift in focus from the state to the city, reconceptualizing the city as a privileged site for the formation and practice of citizenship rights [START_REF] Holston | Cities and citizenship[END_REF]Isin, 2000;[START_REF] Staeheli | Globalization and the scales of citizenship[END_REF].

The common thread running through these debates is what I would like to refer to as the development of an urban spatial sensibility, and the emancipatory political projects it inspires. The development of such a sensibility generates possibilities for spatially conscious politics in fighting against injustice -understood as domination and oppression -and the following formulation is one such possibility informed by three notions: right to the city, right to difference, and the spatial dialectics of injustice.

The major premise is that (in)justice has a spatial dimension to it, and that this dimension should be conceived dialectically, focusing not merely on forms but, more importantly, on processes as well. In other words, the very production of space not only manifests various forms of injustice, but actually produces and reproduces them (maintaining, therefore, established relations of domination and oppression). The emphasis on processes does not imply that distributional issues are unimportant. It should rather be seen as a critique of the tendency to reduce social justice to distributional issues.

A spatial dialectics of injustice may be conceived to address this issue, with two notions: spatiality of injustice and injustice of spatiality. While the former notion implies that justice has a spatial dimension to it, and therefore, that a spatial perspective might be used to discern injustice in space, the latter puts emphasis on established structures in their capacities to produce and reproduce injustice through space. The emphasis, therefore, is not on space per se, but the processes that produce space, and, at the same time, the implications of these produced spaces on relations of domination and oppression. The basic features of the dialectical formulation are, therefore, as follows:

• focusing on spatiality as a process; as a producer and reproducer of, at the same time being produced and reproduced by, relatively stable structures;

• recognizing the interrelatedness of injustice and spatiality as producing, reproducing, and sustaining each other through a mediation of larger permanences that give rise to both of them.

Two more notions need to be mentioned: the right to the city and the right to difference. The right to the city implies not only a right to urban space, but to a political space as well, with the participation of all city residents. The merit of the notion, however, does not derive principally from the idea of formal participation. Its merit, in other words, does not lie in an increase in the number of those who participate in the affairs of the city. It rather lies in its potential to generate a peculiar relationship to the political order of things by constituting the city as a space of politics. What this implies is a departure from and resistance to the state as the primary agent for the construction of political identities and as the principal site for political struggle. What is promising about the notion, therefore, is not a straightforward proliferation of formal participants, but, rather, the very possibility of the formation of voices, of political subjectivization it generates in and around urban space.

The right to difference is complementary to the right to the city. What it implies is a right to resistance, and not an exclusive focus on difference as particularity. The right to be different, as Lefebvre (1976, p. 35) wrote, is "the right not to be classified forcibly into categories which have been determined by the necessarily homogenizing powers". It is a right to politics that questions the order of things. To put it in the language of police and politics, following Ranciére, it implies -as a right to politics -not the simple affirmation of an identity, but rather, a dis-identification denying the identity imposed by the police order.

A notion of spatial justice might serve as a mobilizing discourse through the cultivation of a spatial sensibility toward injustice, and a spatial culture to fight against it through claiming these two rights. Besides, it helps one to distinguish between decidedly individualistic and collective interpretations of these rights, between appropriation and domination of urban space in the name of a right to the city and difference. Finally, it calls into question the relationship between spatiality and the formation of rights claims and their practice.

But what is the nature of this notion? Let me proceed by stating what it is not: it is not a programmatic definition, a procedure or a state program. In other words, 'spatial justice' is not an end, however defined, to be achieved. As Badiou (1999, p. 29) wrote, "[i]njustice is not the immediate disorder of which justice would be the ideal order". The notion makes spatially conscious politics possible through addressing particular 'wrongs' engendered and sustained by spatial dynamics. In other words, it helps, as a properly political notion, to wrong the 'right' order of the police. The notion of spatial justice, therefore, may be seen as a critique of systematic domination and oppression produced and sustained by particular forms of spatialization; a critique aimed at cultivating new sensibilities towards forms of injustice rooted in space and spatial dynamics.

I have tried to demonstrate how French urban policy defines -if not explicitly -a symbolic whole and tries to identify problem spaces that do not fit in that whole, rendering the already economically vulnerable inhabitants of these areas politically vulnerable as well. The particular politics that I have offered using the triad of spatial dialectics of injustice, right to the city, and right to difference suggests that the challenge is not to identify the problem because the whole things is a 'problem'; the city produces, and in turn is produced, by an ensemble of social relations and spatial dynamics. Far from such an attitude, the French state, especially in the last ten years or so, has tended to conceptualize the problem as a question of security 8 , identifying 'points in space' and devising containment policies for them. The question, however, might be -and in my opinion should be -conceptualized as a question of justice with a spatial sensitivity towards injustice -with an attempt, in other words, to see the spatial dimension of injustice and wrong the 'right' order of the police.

Acknowledgements

An initial version of this paper was presented at the Rights to the City Conference in Rome, Italy, 29 May -1 June, 2002. I wish to thank the organizers of the conference and the participants for their constructive remarks.

Notes

1 A recent series of articles in Libération (8 April, 2002) under the rubric "The French, are they afraid of everything?" listed the suburb as one of the fears of the French, among other fears such as terrorism and AIDS. 2 Even as early as 1983, an article appeared in Le Monde (6 August) on "series of violence in large public housing estates" [grands ensembles]: "[W]e lost count of violent incidents in certain neighborhoods". 3 See, for example, a recent article that appeared in Le Monde (20 April, 2002) on the increase in abusive police controls in "sensitive neighborhoods" [quartiers sensibles] with the subtitle "a targeted repression". 4 A section called 'Cities and Suburbs' was created as part of the French Intelligence Service (Renseignements Généraux) in 1991. 5 The report was entitled Banlieues en difficultés: la relégation. J. M. Delarue later became the head of the DIV. 6 Discours prononcé par Monsieur François Mitterrand Président de la République devant les assises de Banlieue 89, Bron, le mardi 4 décembre 1990. Présidence de la République, Service de Presse. 7 Parts of this section draw from [START_REF] Dikeç | Justice and the spatial imagination[END_REF]. 8 The new government, following the elections in May 2002, declared that the issue of insecurity would be one of its main concerns.


Mustafa Dikec
email: mdikec@yahoo.com

Voices into Noises: Ideological Determination of Unarticulated Justice Movements

This paper looks at incidents of unrest in social housing neighbourhoods in the peripheral areas (banlieues) of French cities in the 1990s. It first focuses on the responses of the French state, and demonstrates how such areas have been constituted as 'menace' and such incidents as 'violence', through the state's discursive articulations. Then, by providing an account focused on the incidents themselves, it argues that these incidents are responses to various forms of injustice, from discrimination and police brutality to constantly increasing unemployment. They are, in other words, manifestations of contention, raising claims for justice, and not merely acts of violence.

'Justice Movements'?

.

Unarticulated

as they are, such incidents are nevertheless episodic mobilisations that manifest contention and raise certain claims.

Such incidents had occurred in the banlieues before, but what makes recent years different is the changing nature of the responses of the French state to these incidents, under governments both of the Left and the Right. In the 1980s, under the Socialist government, such incidents were believed to have a political dimension. They were seen, as the former head of the 'Cities and banlieues' section at the French Intelligence Service puts it, as "a just revolt of the youth" and were addressed with policies focused more on prevention than repression (Bui-Trong, 1998b, p. 230;emphasis added). This vision, however, started to change in the 1990s, as observed by historian Eric Mace The difference between the 90s and the 80s, is that, in the 80s … there was a political awareness, saying: 'Deep down, these violences have a political significance. They challenge French society's ability to integrate generally'. In the 90s, under the term 'urban violence', what constitutes a threat is designated-what threatens, and what has to be intervened on, in fact, to protect us against this threat (interview in Marchands de se ´curite ´, 2002). Such a change in the perception of incidents taking place in the banlieues not only shadowed their political significance, but also hindered, if not completely prevented, potential political mobilisations arising from the banlieues. As a local activist from Vaulx-en-Velin, a banlieue of Lyons, put it When there's an initiative in a banlieue, there are people, that, that in other respects you would never suspect, people who are, I don't know, members of anti-racist groups, part of movements for the defence of human rights, and who say to us, 'What you're doing is good, but it's a pity because', roughly speaking, 'There are too many foreigners in it', or else, 'You're a bit too connoted' … It's dismaying to hear things like that! (Yves Mena, interview with the author, 23 May 2002).

Hence the title 'Voices into Noises'. My argument in this paper is that the political implications of such incidents were obscured by state-led discursive articulations of 'the banlieue', which involved the 'reconfiguration of a perceptive field' through which the banlieue-in its negatively connoted form-was provided its universe of reference. Drawing from Rancie `re (2000), I refer to this reconfiguration as ideological; that is, a reconfiguration of a perceptive field through the putting in place of sensible evidence, which has real effects on ways of being, saying and doing. This reconfiguration, I suggest, highlighted less the difficult material conditions in the banlieues than the threat posed by the banlieue to security and social order, rendering episodic manifestations of contention acts of violence rather than claims for justice. Hence the sub-title 'Ideological Determination of Unarticulated Justice Movements'.

My approach, then, focuses less on the ways in which collective actors articulate claims around the notion of justice (Nicholls and Beaumont, this issue) than on the state's discursive articulations that affect the ways in which claims for justice are heard-as voices or as noises. Rather than insisting on the self-evident quality of banlieues as given objects of intervention, I look at the ways in which they were constituted as objects of intervention with an associated discourse. My approach, therefore, follows in a tradition that does not conceive of the discursive and the non-discursive as distinct realms [START_REF] Laclau | Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics[END_REF]. Such an approach maintains that objects ('the real world') do not exist independently of ideas about them and that discursive articulations have material effects in that they produce relatively stable "effect[s] of boundary, fixity, and surface" (Butler, 1993, p. 12).

This paper first illustrates the negative images associated with the banlieues, then clarifies the notion of 'statements of the state'. The following two sections focus on the responses of the French state to incidents of social unrest in the banlieues in the early 1990s and the implications of the state's discursive articulations of them. The last two sections highlight the worsening conditions in the banlieues and argue that such incidents are responses to various forms of injustice encountered by the inhabitants-from discrimination and police brutality to constantly increasing unemployment.

Rearticulations

On 4 July 1990, an article, entitled "A radioscopy of the 'fears' of the French", was published in Le Monde. Based on a study by the Institute of Interior Security Studies, the article listed the top three 'fears of the French' as drugs, AIDS and terrorism, followed by various others, one of which was 'immigrants'. What this study shows, the article argued, was that a certain consensus around the issue of security was formed in the social imaginary.

More than a decade later, during the presidential campaign, another journal, Libe ´ration, published a series of articles under the theme 'Portrait of France'. One of the series was devoted to the 'fears of the French', and listed nine issues as major objects of fear in the social imaginary (8 April 2002). The issue of security, the article argued, has become the major preoccupation of the French, before employment, which, during the presidential campaign of 1995, was the major preoccupation of the French (Le Monde, 8 March 2002). It was at the centre of Jacques Chirac's discourse on 'social fracture', a discourse which he abandoned during his 2002 campaign that was centred on the issue of 'insecurity'.

The list of Libe ´ration was not very different from the list published in 1990; there were some new entries related to contemporary phenomena-such as 'mad cow disease' and the hazards of mobile phones-and immigrants did not figure in the 2002 list. Another new entry was 'banlieue': the banlieue was one of the nine major 'phobias' of the French in the year 2002.

The change-the appearance of the banlieue and the disappearance of immigrants as objects of fear in these lists-is an important one. These lists, of course, should not be seen as transcriptions of 'reality' onto the pages of newspapers. They do not, therefore, provide the researcher with conclusions, with the necessary level of confidence to make assertions as to what has 'really' changed in French society. However, they evoke curiosity and provide the researcher with a host of questions, if not answers. Hostility towards immigrants in the French society has not decreased in the past decade. On the contrary, xenophobic reactions have increased in recent years, which is partly reflected by the rise in the popularity of the Extreme Right party National Front, which made it to the second round in the 2002 presidential elections, defeating the Socialists. Why, then, were 'immigrants' not among the major fears of the French in the latter list? Why was the banlieue on the list? It is widely known that the majority of people living in the banlieues (the ones implied by its almost pejorative sense, and not including the rich) are immigrants or people from immigration backgrounds. Does the banlieue represent the fear of the Other in a spatially reified form? When one expresses fears about the banlieue, does one express other fears without really talking about them? And if the banlieue is indeed the spatially reified form of the fear of the other, how did that happen and what are its political implications?

Banlieue literally means suburb, but it carries different characteristics from the ones associated with the North American suburb. Originally an administrative concept, the term 'banlieue' geographically denotes peripheral areas of large cities in general. Such a geographical designation is not necessarily negative. Nevertheless, the very term evokes an image of excluded places, as its etymological origin suggests 'Ban' comes from the earliest medieval times, when it meant both the power of command and the power of exclusion as part of the power of command. Banned [Banni], banishment [banissement], banlieue-all these terms have the same origin; they refer to places of exclusion. Clearly, banlieues have existed independently from terms used to designate them, they have made and often managed their own history, they have not simply been excluded places, but their existence does nonetheless express this will to create on the outskirts of the city places that do not belong to the system (Paul-Levy in Banlieues 89, 1986, p. 125). Now the term mostly evokes an image of a peripheral area with concentrations of large-scale, mostly high-rise social housing projects (referred to as grands ensembles, but also as cite ´s and HLMs) and problems associated, in the US and the UK, with inner-city areas. In order to emphasise the differences that have to do with the implications of the term's etymological origin (excluded places) and geographical connotation (outskirts of the city), I hereafter use the term 'banlieue', instead of 'suburb', without italicising it.

Since the early 1980s, Rey (1999, p. 274) writes, the banlieues of large French cities have "arouse[d] a feeling of fear". In the social imaginary, fed partly by the media covering incidents of unrest, the banlieue figures as a threat to security, social order and peace. This threat, furthermore, has become closely associated with the populations living in banlieues, often defined in ethnic terms. The fear of banlieue is closely associated with a feeling of insecurity and a fear of immigration [START_REF] Rey | La peur des banlieues[END_REF].

A similar observation is made by Hargreaves, who argues that the 1990s was a turning-point in the eventual association of the banlieue with a feeling of insecurity and a fear of immigration During the 1990s, a new social space has been delineated in France: that of the 'banlieue(s)' (literally, 'suburb(s)'). A term that once served simply to denote peripheral parts of urban areas has become a synonym of alterity, deviance, and disadvantage. The mass media have played a central role in this reconstruction, in the course of which they have disseminated and reinforced stereotypical ideas of people of immigrant origin as fundamentally menacing to the established social order (Hargreaves, 1996, p. 607; emphasis added).

Hargreaves exemplifies the media creation of 'the banlieues as a news category' amalgamating 'urban deprivation, immigration, and social disorder' in the 1990s with an issue of the journal L'Express, which presented a cover story under the title "Banlieues-Immigration: State of Emergency" (5-12 June 1991). The same journal, however, almost two decades ago, had presented another cover story on banlieues under the title "Banlieues: 'Thugs' Are Talking to You". The sub-title read: "At the gates of large cities, thousands of hoodlums are produced" (3-9 September 1973). The 'thugs' and 'hoodlums' of L'Express, as the cover drawing and the photos presented inside portray them, in 1973 were all 'White'. They would 'change colour' in 1991, but the spatial reference would remain the same and, in this sense, L'Express best exemplifies the 'changing colour' of the banlieue, of the feared outside, in the social imaginary. What happened in the 1990s, therefore, seems to be less a delineation of a new social space than a rearticulation of an already existing delineation.

Media reviews provide clear examples of the changing image of the banlieue in the past two decades [START_REF] Mace ´ | Le traitement me ´diatique de la se ´curite ´[END_REF][START_REF] Collovald | Violence et de ´linquance dans la presse. politisation d'un malaise social et technicisation de son traitement[END_REF][START_REF] Collovald | Des de ´sordres sociaux a `la violence urbaine[END_REF][START_REF] Hargreaves | A deviant construction: the French media and the 'Banlieues[END_REF]. However, the current image of the banlieue is not simply the product of journalistic accounts with a greed for spectacular incidents ('riots') and catastrophic scenarios. Most of the journalistic categories used to frame banlieues were institutionalised by 'the statements of the state', notably in the 1990s, which was a period of intense discursive investment in the spatial delineations that distinguished the banlieue from the city. In this period, I would like to argue, the French state actively contributed to the rearticulation of the banlieue as a 'threat', as an object of 'fear'. It did so through the creation of new institutional structures, putting in place a series of sensible evidences, producing and putting into circulation new notions and, eventually, providing new discursive terms associated with the banlieues. The banlieue's discursive register was thus redefined through a reconfiguration of a perceptive field through the statements of the state in which the banlieue would become the spatially reified form of 'threat', notably with the rise of republican nationalism in the mid 1990s. 2

The Statements of the State

States, if the pun be forgiven, state; the arcane rituals of a court of law, the formulae of royal assent to an Act of Parliament, visits of school inspectors, are all statements. They define, in great detail, acceptable forms and images of social activity and individual and collective identity; they regulate, in empirically specifiable ways, much-very much, by the 20th century-of social life. Indeed, in this sense 'the State' never stops talking (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985, p. 3).

The power of definition, as Hobbes knew, is a highly strategic power invested in the state (Connolly, 1991, p. 207).

If capitalism refers not merely to an economy, but also to regulated forms of social relations, Corrigan and Sayer (1985, p. 191) argue, then the state has an important role to play in this process, as the 'key material regulative agency' through which capitalism's wider cultural revolution is organised. The term 'cultural revolution' is intended to capture the regulated formation of identities and subjectivities, and the state-always in the making-is the major agency in this process. State formation as a process depends upon the normalising and ŗendering natural of an historically and spatially constructed social order which, in turn, serve to legitimise the state's actions. Rendering 'obvious' of the ontological and epistemological premises of a particular social order which, in fact, are contingent both historically and spatially, is the major achievement of the state and fundamental to its formation. To do that, the state needs to state. "The state's statements", however, are neither neutral nor without effect; by "defining, mapping, naming 'reality'", states, in fact make claims (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985, p. 141). The state's "descriptive names (seemingly neutral, natural, universal, obvious) are in fact impositional claims" (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985, p. 7;emphasis added).

The state's self-legitimation through its 'impositional claims' and 'descriptive names' is closely linked to the establishment and reproduction of consensus. However, one should not overlook "the degree of mutuality between consensus and coercion in state formation" [START_REF] Corrigan | The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution[END_REF] 2). The state, for one thing, has an important role to play in the constitution and regulation of social identities and, therefore, (political) subjectivities. What the state is and what it does are important. But equally important is what it says, what it states. The statements of the state have the force of law, power of designation, constitution and regulation; they not only normalise and render 'obvious' certain definitions and designations, but also materialise them.

Out of the vast range of human social capacities-possible ways in which social life could be lived-state activities more or less forcibly 'encourage' some whilst suppressing, marginalizing, eroding, undermining others. Schooling for instance comes to stand for education, policing for order, voting for political participation. Fundamental social classifications, like age and gender, are enshrined in law, embedded in institutions, routinized in administrative procedures and symbolized in rituals of state. Certain forms of activity are given the official seal of approval, others are situated beyond the pale. This has cumulative, and enormous, cultural consequences; consequences for how people identify (in many cases, have to identify) themselves and their 'place' in the world (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985, p. 4).

My approach, then, focuses on the statements of the state and the ways in which they become part of the ideological project of configuring a perceptive field and thus of affecting ways of being, saying and doing. The statements of the state are not produced in a vacuum. And once they are produced, once a relatively dominant perceptive field has been organised (which itself is an ideological achievement), what is produced at the same time is not merely a world of words and rhetoric, but ways of seeing, doing and being-in short, a world of sensibilities. It is in this world of sensibilities that solutions are proposed and justified accordingly to the problems (re)constituted in the new perceptive field. State statements, therefore, are embedded in the everyday lives of people and affect them once they are (re)formulated. They, in other words, have real effects: "What is defined as real (which is not to say the definitions are uncontested) is real in its consequences" (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985, p. 142).

Such an approach, however, carries the risk of giving too much unity to the state; after all, governments change and there are different political orientations among the agents that are part of state institutions, which do not necessarily work as parts of a perfectly coherent and integrated whole. There is, however, an aspect of the state that makes it possible to study the state's statements and policies, which is not its unity, but its continuity as an eminent source and power of definition and designation, both quantitatively (a 'talkative' actor) and qualitatively (an authoritative and legitimate actor). The representations, designations, definitions-in sum, the statements of the state-continue to be highly effective tools (if not the only ones, and if not uncontested) in orienting actions and practices. They also affect, as I suggested in the introduction, the ways in which claims for justice are heard. It is now to these statements that I turn, recapitulating some of the major responses of the French state to the incidents of unrest in the banlieues in the early 1990s.

Reconfigurations

I was lucky enough, a few years ago, to go to the US and the UK to work on these issues of security policy, and I came back with a few experiences in mind. I came back with the experience of curfews: 280 cities in the US had set up curfews for teenagers. I came back with the experiences around cameras, camera systems to control inner cities in particular. I also came back with those ideas and policies set up around the private cities, the gated communities. I also came back with these expanding ideas about private police, the privatisation of private [sic] police, the development of private security, with the development of Giuliani's zero tolerance policy in New York, too. All these things, ten, five years ago, would have been unthinkable in France. Now they exist. (Luc Gwiazdzinski, urban planner; interview in Marchands de se ´curite

´, 2002) Since the early 1980s, two issues, among others, have largely occupied the agenda of policy-makers and the larger public in France: the immigration question and incidents of social unrest in the banlieues. An urban policy programme-based on the spatial delimitation and designation of 'priority neighbourhoods' with a focus on 'prevention'-was initiated following the incidents of social unrest in the summer of 1981-referred to as the 'hot summer'-that took place in the banlieues of Lyons, a few months after the Socialist government came to power. These banlieues had a huge social housing stock and contained a large proportion of foreign population and second-generation immigrants.

Similar incidents had occurred in the banlieues before. This time, however, the Left was in power for the first time in the Fifth Republic and such incidents had a particular significance, especially for the opposition Right, which had centred its critique on the issue of the 'soft' attitude of the new government towards immigration [START_REF] Bachmann | Violences urbaines: Ascension et chute des classes moyennes a travers cinquante ans de politique de la ville[END_REF][START_REF] Mucchielli | Violences et inse ´curite ´: Fantasmes et re ´alite ´s dans le de ´bat franc ¸ais[END_REF]. It was a period of high political tension: the Left had come to power with projects to abolish capital punishment, suspend the expulsion of 'illegal' immigrants and give voting right to foreigners in local elections. Besides, race riots had occurred on the other side of the Channel (notably in Brixton) and their ghost was haunting the French republic.

The measures taken in the early 1980s did not prevent the recurrence of incidents of social unrest in the banlieues. Between 1982 and 1989, there were five large-scale incidents of social unrest in the banlieues of large French cities according to a list kept by the French Intelligence Service. 3 A major change would occur in the following decade.

In October 1990, furious revolts took place in Vaulx-en-Velin (a banlieue of Lyons), following the killing of a young person of immigrant origin by a police car, which was seen as 'one death too many', as the interviewed local activists put it. This was followed by another revolt in the same year and five others in the following year in various banlieues of large French cities, all with social housing and high proportions of immigrants and/or people from immigrant backgrounds. What was particularly shocking this time was that almost all the neighbourhoods where revolts occurred were sites of intervention under the urban policy (the 'priority neighbourhoods') initiated following the incidents of the early 1980s, and some were even seen as exemplary. Moreover, this series of revolts occurred in the context of hotly debated issues. The international scene was occupied with Intifada, the Salman Rushdie affair and the Gulf War. In France, there was a hot debate following the Islamic veil affair of 1989, to which the "public response was almost unanimously hostile, not to say at times hysterical" (Jennings, 2000, p. 584). The reflection of these issues in France was the development of arguments against particular communities, focusing particularly on North African immigrants and Islam as a religion. The spatial reference of such arguments was the banlieue, now accompanied by the term 'ghetto'. 4 The revolts of the early 1990s gave rise to five developments, which I interpret as five instances of the reconfiguration of a perceptive field by statements. These statements were directly generated by the incidents of Vaulx-en-Velin in 1990, which had become the symbol of the 'malaise of banlieues'. They were, in other words, formulated as responses to the 'malaise of banlieues', with constant references to Vaulx-en-Velin, which was its most eminent symbol.

The first of these was the creation of a City Ministry and the assignment of sous-pre ´fets to the 'most sensitive' departments as the local arms of the central state responsible for designated neighbourhoods. This was an important statement in many ways. The major mission of the new minister for the city was defined as 'eliminating exclusion', with a focus on 400 'neighbourhoods in difficulty'. Thus, both 'the object' and 'the problem' were constituted at the same time and the creation of the new ministry suggested the presence of a 'given' problem to be tackled by the creation of a new institutional structure. This was the first instance in the reconfiguration of a perceptive field in the 1990s.

The second instance was the passing of many laws to fight against 'exclusion'. One of these laws was particularly famous, the 1991 Loi d'orientation sur la ville (LOV). Conceived to promote 'social cohesion' and avoid 'segregation', the LOV was referred to as the 'anti-ghetto' law. Like 'exclusion', 'ghettos' were now given problems-defined in ethnic terms-to be addressed by the state.

The third instance was the collaboration of the new City Ministry with INSEE (the State Statistical Institute) for profiling the neighbourhoods of intervention under urban policy and for the 'objectification' of their selection criteria. This intervention was closely related to the creation of the new City Ministry, for it constituted, spatially, its 'object'. The neighbourhoods were thus constituted as the objects of a national policy for fighting against exclusion (Este `be, 2001), using unemployment, young people and immigrants as criteria for 'the excluded'.

The fourth instance also involved a collaboration, this time with the Ministry of Justice, presented as 'a new stage of prevention of delinquency'. In 1991, the Ministry of Justice published a document entitled 'The law acts in the city' (Ministe `re de la Justice, 1991). "The law", it was stated, was "mobilised to better respond to urban problems". There was a concern with the weakening of the authority of the law in the city ("the place of law must be reinforced in the city"). The proposal made was to have a "more direct presence of the Law [la Justice] in sensitive neighbourhoods" (a new term entering the agenda in the early 1990s, used to refer to neighbourhoods with high levels of delinquency and likelihood of rioting), with the creation-for example, of Maisons de Justice et du droit (MJD, hereafter). The MJDs were conceived to "reinforce the presence of the Law" (Ministe `re de la Justice, 1991, pp. 4 and 5; emphasis added) through a rapid, on the spot, treatment of delinquency in "sensitive neighbourhoods".

The fifth instance was the creation of the 'Cities and Banlieues' section at the Renseignements Ge ´ne ´raux (the French Intelligence Service, RG hereafter) in 1991, which would specialise in 'urban violence', another new term entering the scene in the 1990s. The involvement of the RG was a strong statement, which gave the impression that the issue of 'urban violence' was a rather serious issue that had to be attended to by a state institution like the RG. The secrecy of the activities of the RG and its more traditional focus on terrorism strengthened that impression and gave even more authority to the information 'released' by the RG, which introduced new notions such as 'urban violence', 'sensitive neighbourhoods', 'riots' and 'urban guerrilla' into the agenda. Not only was the constant surveillance of the banlieues justified, even rendered necessary, but new ways of talking about them were also generated by the notions produced and put into circulation by the RG.

In addition to the production of new discursive terms to talk about the banlieues, the RG's involvement was also effective through the production of new statistics, with a new notion-'urban violence'. This novelty had important consequences since no statistical information had previously been gathered to measure 'urban violence'. The impression was that there was a sheer 'explosion' of 'urban violence'. These statistics were used by the media and politicians asking for more security measures without questioning their basis in fact. It was in this period that the neighbourhoods with 'bad reputation' of the 1980s became a 'menace' (Este `be, 1999), shifting from being neighbourhoods 'in danger' to 'dangerous neighbourhoods' [START_REF] Bonelli | Des quartiers en danger aux "quartiers dangereux[END_REF]. Through such statements, the banlieue was constituted as a self-contained 'object' and then was provided with the discursive terms that linked it to issues of 'urban violence', crime, delinquency, immigration and French identity. It was placed, in other words, in a reconfigured perceptive field.

A New Perceptive Field

It is this reconfiguration of a perceptive field, of putting into place sensible evidence such as statistics, new notions and categories, that I would like to call ideological. The image of the banlieue constituted through such reconfigurations served to justify, even rendered necessary, policies of repression and constant surveillance (such as increasing and redeploying police forces, creating new police forces such as the 'proximity police', introducing new measures such as 'local security contracts', devising mechanisms for the rapid, on-the-spot treatment of delinquency, the involvement of the French Intelligence Service).

But this is only one dimension of the effects of such a reconfiguration. As the observation of an 'urban planner' presented at the start of the previous section şuggests, (private) security measures that "would have been unthinkable in France" some 10 years ago are now thinkable, even realised. "The new El Dorado is the banlieue" (Marchands de se ´curite ´, 2002). The 'new El Dorado' for whom?-for a relatively new sector that employs more than 100 000 people, a sector that hires and advances more rapidly than the rest of the economy: the private security sector, or the 'security merchants' (marchands de se ´curite ´), to borrow the title of the 2002 documentary by Richard Vargas. 5 In 1997, the Socialist government had made the issue of insecurity its second priority after unemployment. In the framework of its programme to 'fight against insecurity', the 'proximity police' and 'local security contracts' (CLS) were implemented, starting in the same year. Since then, the banlieue has been 'the new El Dorado' for private companies offering security services, such as the preparation of 'local security diagnostics' (which is required to have a 'local security contract'), the creation of municipal police and the installation of surveillance cameras.

The reconfiguration of the perceptive field and the rearticulations of the banlieue as a 'threat' in the 1990s might account for these developments. They might also account for the different interpretations of 'riots' in the 1980s and the 1990s. In the 1980s, the incidents of unrest in the banlieues were addressed by policies of prevention and they were seen as having a political significance and not merely as intrinsic acts of violence. This interpretation is shared by the creator of the 'Cities and Banlieues' section at the French Intelligence Service, Lucienne Bui-Trong

The really critical events were the violences which took place in Ve ´nissieux, at the Minguettes, during the summer, the summer 81 I think, but it was, they were, those violences, phenomena of degree 5 or 6, on my scale. But still, it had already considerably impressed the ministry, well, the government, as it was a left-wing government, so that government was looking for very comprehensive solutions, and from there they launched the … the Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy had asked Bonnemaison, the commission of mayors, to prepare a whole doctrine on that, so, it was the starting-point for the police, for urban policy, let's say, a social and comprehensive work on the neighbourhoods (Lucienne Bui-Trong, interview with the author, 6 June 2002). This vision, however, started to change in the 1990s and policies focused more on repression than prevention while the problems in the banlieues further worsened.

'Twenty Years for Unemployment, 20 Minutes for Insecurity' 6

Will we be surprised each morning upon seeing the generations of the banlieues break and burn if they are told each morning that they have no chance of ever taking action in history? (Balibar et al., 1995, p. 9). It's difficult to have a logical, general, systematic discourse about rethinking the city, while people are saying: 'Well, that's discourse and that's long term, it's to be left to academics with leisure'. We have to answer the population's claims: 'We want security, we want police, we want cameras. It works well elsewhere, so we're following suit'. And that can be done in 15 seconds (Luc Gwiazdzinski, Urban Planner; interview in Marchands de se ´curite ´, 2002).

The incidents of the early 1990s generated new laws, new measures, new statistical categories; in sum, new statements. One of the stated objectives of these new statements, in the framework of urban policy, was the creation of jobs for the inhabitants of the 'priority neighbourhoods'. However, the unemployment rate in these priority neighbourhoods did not decrease. On the contrary: for the 1990-99 period, the unemployment rate in these neighbourhoods increased three times more than the national unemployment rate. Onequarter of the active population in the priority neighbourhoods (25.4 per cent), more than one-third of foreigners (35.3 per cent) and again more than one-third of young people aged 15-24 years (39.5 per cent) living in the designated neighbourhoods of urban policy were unemployed in 1999 (INSEE-DIV, no date).

Another increase was observed in the number of riots. Between 1982 and 1989, there were around five large-scale revolts in the French banlieues [START_REF] Bui-Trong | Violence urbaine dans les quartiers sensibles[END_REF]. Forty-eight large-scale riots took place in French banlieues between 1990 and 2000, not to mention a further 250 riots of a smaller scale, referred to as 'mini-riots' (la mini-e ´meute) (see [START_REF] Bui-Trong | L'inse ´curite ´des quartiers sensibles: une e ´chelle d'e ´valuation[END_REF]. There are common features in these 'riots' and places where they occurred. 7 I have identified three.

First, all, but 2, of the areas where riots occurred are priority neighbourhoods of urban policy. Out of the 38 sites where such incidents occurred, 8 4 were included from the policy's inception in 1982, 3 were included from 1983 onwards, 13 from 1984 and another 13 from 1989. All of these priority neighbourhoods experienced riots in the 1990s, after 'the return of the State'. Three of them were included in 1996, after having experienced riots and two of them have never been priority neighbourhoods.

Secondly, all the riots took place in social housing neighbourhoods with high proportions of immigrants and people of immigrant extraction, and dramatic levels of unemployment, often long-term. In terms of unemployment, the communes where these neighbourhoods are located show similar characteristics; that is, dramatically increasing levels of unemployment following the crisis of the early 1970s and the ensuing processes of economic restructuring. In 1975, the unemployment rates in these communes were slightly higher or lower than the national unemployment rate, except for a couple of cases where it was two times higher than the national unemployment rate (Toulon, 7.9 per cent, and La Seyne-sur-Mer, 7.5 per cent). After that, all of these communes were severely hit by diminishing industrial and manufacturing activities. Table 1 shows this dramatic increase in unemployment rates, first from 1975 to 1982, and then from 1975 to 1999, for the 38 communes where revolts occurred.

To give an example, in Mantes-la-Jolie (in the Paris region), included in urban policy since 1982, the unemployment rate in 1982 was 2.6 times more than that of 1975 (10.3 per cent compared with 3.9 per cent) and 5.1 times higher in 1999 (20.2 per cent) than in 1975. So for the first period, Mantes-la-Jolie is one of the 21 communes in the 2.0-2.9 range and, for the second period, one of the 6 in the 5.0-5.9 range.

As for the levels of unemployment, Table 2 below might provide some insight. This table is prepared based on the unemployment rates in the 38 communes for the census years 1975, 1982, 1990 and 1999, and shows the minimum and the 'priority neighbourhoods' in the banlieues, all of which were once working-class neighbourhoods with low levels of unemployment. These figures suggest that neighbourhoods suffer from a deeply embedded, constantly worsening unemployment problem. In this sense, 'riots' may be seen as responses to severe material conditions, experienced as persistent injustices. There is, however, more to it than that.

In stigmatised neighbourhoods, as the interviews conducted in Vaulx-en-Velin suggest, immigrants and young people of immigrant extraction, especially if they are from North Africa, suffer from racial discrimination in the job market, in relations with the police and in their political engagements (see also [START_REF] Wacquant | Urban outcasts: stigma and division in the black American ghetto and the French urban periphery[END_REF]. Not only, therefore, is there a discontent rising from serious material conditions, but also a feeling of resentment, which is also recognised by Bui-Trong as a major factor in riots. When asked about the major reasons for the riots, she answered the following Riots, according to my observation, riots occur in neighbourhoods with a large population of immigrant origin, so they primarily reflect a difficulty of integration, and resentment, so, a resentment very strongly felt by young people of the second generation, and even the third generation too … These problems are experienced as a rejection from society, and, let's say, they have the feeling they're relegated. But I think the riots, the context, the general background in which they appear, is this background, this feeling, this impression the people have of being relegated from society … Now, incidents that trigger riots, that's another issue completely, you see, there's the triggering incident, and there's the background that's going to make it … because incidents triggering riots are like the spark that sets fire to a stock of gunpowder, but that's what the gunpowder is. It's that resentment (Lucienne Bui-Trong, interview with the author, 6 June 2002).

The 'triggering incidents', the spark to the gunpowder, constitute the third common feature of riots. Most of these riots (34 out of 48) were provoked by the killing, accidentally or not, of a young person, of immigrant origin, of the neighbourhood in question. In 29 riots out of 48, the police are implicated (questioning, wounding or killing). This number, in fact, might be even higher. For example, the triggering incident for the 1991 riots in Le Val Fourre ´neighbourhood of Mantes-la-Jolie is given, in Bui-Trong's list, as a discussion over entrance to a reception given at the municipality's ice rink. But there is more to ţhe story. 9 After some young people, following a dispute over entry, start attacking the parked cars at the parking lot of the ice rink, the municipality calls the riot police (CRS). Someone throws a bicycle on the riot police from the sixth floor of a building, confrontations start, store windows are smashed and the commercial centre is ransacked. The riot police arrest six young people and put them in police custody. It is a Saturday night. One of these young people, an 18-year-old resident of the neighbourhood, from an immigrant background, is asthmatic, he has regularly to take medicines to prevent an attack and the cell where he is kept is far from ideal. The next day is a Sunday, so the police custody is automatically prolonged, since the courts are closed. On Monday morning, the family of the young person brings in the necessary medicines to the police station, but they are not allowed to give them to him since the medicines are not accompanied by the appropriate medical certificates and necessary official authorisations. Shortly after, the young person has an attack of asthma. He is transferred to the hospital, but it is too late. He dies. 'Spark to the gunpowder': 'riots' start and continue for two days.

This account suggests that the police might be implicated more than the list suggests. In addition to this, there are some curious incidents that call into question the practices of the police. Two of the 'riots', for example, start following the killing of two people in the police station. Another one starts after a police officer shoots and kills a young person of immigrant origin 'while trying to prevent him from committing suicide'. To give yet another example, on one occasion the spark to the gunpowder is discharged by a 'mother of a drug dealer', who 'throws herself out of the window' while the police are searching the premises. This is not to imply that the list of Bui-Trong provides false or distorted accounts. Some of the accounts, however, evoke curiosity as to the practices of the police, which I identify as the third common feature of riots.

These features of the riots of the 1990s culminate in another common aspecttheir political (in)significance, with which I conclude.

Conclusions

What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies? … What we call ideology only achieves consistency by intervening in social space and in its production, and by thus taking on body therein. Ideology per se might well be said to consist primarily in a discourse upon social space (Lefebvre, 1974(Lefebvre, /1991, p. 44), p. 44).

None of these riots in the 1990s has been considered to be concealing important political claims and attempts to address major, persistent injustices, and this, as we have seen, is a major difference in the responses of the French state to incidents of unrest compared with the 1980s. The stigmatising effects of having an address in the banlieue have long been observed by many scholars. Furthermore, there is evidence that police repression is somewhat 'targeted' at certain neighbourhoods classified as 'sensitive neighbourhoods'. In January 2002, the Human Rights League, the Union of Magistrates and the Union of Attorneys of France formed a commission of inquiry to address this issue (Le Monde, 20 April 2002, p. 11). The state, however, responded to the incidents of unrest in the banlieues in the 1990s by reconfiguring a perceptive field through the introduc-tion of 'urban violence' and 'riots' into the agenda, officially inscribing the dualism of city versus banlieue, tightening security measures and declaring its commitment to 'restoring the republican order'. With a discursive space of a particular sort constituted around the banlieues, using a vocabulary of 'urban violence' and 'riots', repression became a focus-and 'legitimately' so-whereas the focus, in the early 1980s, was on 'prevention'. However, the account I have tried to provide above suggests the possibility of interpreting 'riots' not as intrinsic acts of violence, but as, precisely, responses to grave material conditions, conditions that are constantly produced and reproduced. There is no doubt that riots are also marked with elements of violence. However, they are not just looting and burning; they connect to larger dynamics.

And there is a strong spatial dimension to this-a spatiality that contributes to the domination and oppression of inhabitants living in these areas. As many scholars working on the banlieues have observed, while socioeconomic conditions are an important factor, it is mostly a deep feeling of injustice that led to the explosion of incidents of unrest [START_REF] Begag | La re ´volte des lascars contre l'oubli a `Vaulx-en-Velin[END_REF][START_REF] Dubet | Les quartiers d'exil[END_REF][START_REF] Esterle-Hedibel | Jeunes des cite ´s, police et de ´sordres urbains[END_REF][START_REF] Jazouli | Les anne ´es banlieues[END_REF][START_REF] Lapeyronnie | La politique de la ville et la re ´presentation des populations[END_REF][START_REF] Wieviorka | Violence en France[END_REF]. 10 They are, in a sense, responses to spatial injustices, and they might be seen as unarticulated movements of justice for they are manifestations of dissensus addressing at once material, categorical and political conditions that are, among other factors, spatially produced. The element of (spatial) injustice follows not only from economic difficulties that keep the inhabitants 'trapped in space' [START_REF] Harvey | INSEE. INSEE-DIV (no date) Fiches Profil-Quartiers de la politique de la ville: Donne ´es des recensements de la population de 1990 et 1999[END_REF], or 'chained to a place' [START_REF] Bourdieu | Site effects[END_REF], but also from the discursive constitution of the banlieue. As Wacquant argues

The powerful stigma attached to residence in the bounded and segregated spaces, the 'neighbourhoods of exile', … is arguably the single most protrusive feature of the lived experience of those assigned to, or entrapped in, such areas (Wacquant, 1993, p. 369; emphasis removed).

Spatial stigmatisation is part of the daily lives of the inhabitants, youth in particular, of banlieues. Where they live becomes, in a negative way, a defining feature of their place in the society.

Furthermore, this spatial stigmatisation, intensified by the statements of the state, debilitates potential movements of justice rising from the banlieues; first, by legitimising repressive measures and surveillance techniques and, secondly, by turning political claims into disturbances; by turning, in other words, voices into noises. By confining the 'Other' into a geographical elsewhere, by closing the banlieue in itself, this strategy not only removes from perspective the structural dynamics of persistent inequalities (defined now as 'exclusion'), but also reconfigures the 'givens' of the situation by representing the banlieue in itself as a problem, treating the claims coming from the banlieues not as voices that question the order of things, but as noises that disturb the established order. As a local activist from Vaulx-en-Velin puts it Are we going to go on this way with millions of citizens excluded from the system, and just make do with it, with impressive police forces, even the military, to contain these areas and keep these territories well delimited in public space, and where serious crises like riots, and so on, are not considered as political acts, in the sense that they result from a socio-political problem, but are seen only in terms of security and ŗepression? (Pierre-Didier Tche ´tche ´-Ape ´a, interview with the author, 26 April 2002). This delimitation of banlieues in public space is ideological in that it involves, to follow Lefebvre's remarks with which this section opens, a discursive reconfiguration of social space. This spatial configuration conditions perceptions of lack and surplus ('too many immigrants'; 'not enough repression') and, in so doing, it reconfigures the thresholds of toleration, terms of recognition or reject and perceptions of the 'whole' and its 'parts'. Ideological reconfiguration of a perceptive field plays on sensibilities and may easily reify an identified lack or surplus as an object of fear and threat in the social imaginary. It establishes the terms of a discourse with which problems are identified, solutions shaped, measures legitimised, and claims articulated. This social space, however, is not naturally given, although it may seem to be naturalised. The sheer contingency of the established order may be questioned by opening up new discursive spaces organised around different discursive terms, which could form the basis of new political formations that act on the established order of things by organising around a vocabulary of justice and equality.

Notes

1. Literally 'I got the hate'; this phrase is shorthand for the rebellion of the youth of the banlieues, as illustrated in the movie La Haine (Hate) by Mathieu Kassovitz (1995). 2. On the rise of republican nationalism in the 1990s, see, among others, [START_REF] Balibar | Nous, citoyens d'Europe? Les frontie[END_REF], [START_REF] Rudder | Politiques d''immigration' en Europe: du principe d'hospitalite ´a `la re `gle d'inhospitalite[END_REF], [START_REF] De Rudder | Affirmative action et 'discrimination justifie ´e': vers un universalisme en acte[END_REF] and Te ´vanian and Tissot (1998). 3. The list of riots is kept by the 'Cities and Banlieues' section at the French Intelligence Service, which I was told, was not even released to the press. Later, however, Lucienne Bui-Trong (the creator and head, until her retirement in 2001, of the section) kindly agreed to provide me with a copy of the list of large-scale riots (degree 8, according to her scale), which also includes information on the 'triggering incidents' and circumstances. I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to her for providing me with this information. 4. [START_REF] Wacquant | Pour en finir avec le mythe des 'cite ´s-ghettos': les diffe ´rences entre la France et les E ´tats-Unis[END_REF][START_REF] Wacquant | Urban outcasts: stigma and division in the black American ghetto and the French urban periphery[END_REF] has effectively shown that the use of the term 'ghetto' was 'imported' from the US, and that using the term in the French context to imply the same conditions would be deceptive. Furthermore, other statements of the state -statistics -sharply contradicted the ghetto image by demonstrating that the neighborhoods of urban policy were neither ethnically homogeneous nor large enough to function as self-contained segregated areas (see, for example, [START_REF] Champion | Les quartiers 'en convention[END_REF][START_REF] Champion | La diversite ´des quartiers prioritaires: un de ´fi pour la politique de la ville[END_REF]. 5. I would like to express my gratitude to Walter Nicholls for bringing this documentary to my attention, and to Richard Vargas and Coup d'oeil Productions for providing me with a copy and transcript. 6. During one of my visits to the neighborhood of Mas du Taureau in Vaulx-en-Velin, after the new Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy had announced the new repressive measures, one of the young inhabitants of the neighborhood, with whom I was having lunch, had this to say (and I am citing from memory): "They couldn't find a solution to unemployment for 20 years now, but they've found the solution to insecurity in 20 minutes". Sarkozy's new measures include more authority to the police, prohibition of the gathering of young people in the halls of buildings and the provision of 'flash-ball' guns, shooting plastic balls, to police officers in the 'sensitive neighbourhoods', thus enabling them to shoot 'delinquents' without killing them. 7. The analysis is based on the list of large-scale riots provided by Lucienne Bui-Trong. 8. This number seems contradictory given that there were 48 incidents. Some communes, however, experienced incidents more than once, so while the number of incidents is 48, the number of communes where they occurred is 38. 9. This account is based on Bachmann and Le Guennec (1996, pp. 445-446) and Jazouli (1992, pp. 153-154).

10. Jazouli (1992, p. 169), for example, writes that young people, particularly of North African origin, constantly suffer from discriminatory practices and develop "a particular sensitivity towards injustice".

Table 3 .

 3 Unemployment rates (percentages) and population in the urban policy neighbourhoods of Mantes-la-Jolie and Garges-le `s-Gonesse, 1990 and 1999

		Le Val Fourre ´Mantes-la-Jolie	Neighbourhoods Garges-le `s-Gonesse
		1990	1999	1990	1999	1990	1999	1990	1999
	Unemployment	15.7	25.7	20.2	12.1	16.1	25.7	14.2	22.4
	Unemployment,	24.0	37.7	32.4	19.5	25.4	34.6	23.3	31.3
	15-24 year olds
	Population	25 496		43 679		66 880		97 911
	Source: INSEE-DIV (no date).

Ţable 1. Unemployment rate increase for selected periods in communes where riots occurred

Number of communes where unemployment rate is multiplied by 1.5-1.9 5.0-5.9 2.0-2.9 7 3.0-3.9 4.0-4.9 Sources: Calculated from INSEE (1990INSEE ( , 1999)). a The commune in question is Brunoy, the only one out of the 38 where the unemployment rate decreases in a given period (from 1982 to 1990), and then rises up to 9.0 per cent in 1999. Brunoy is in the department of Essonne and is a banlieue in the Paris agglomeration. The incidents had occurred in 1992 and the commune has been included in urban policy since 1996. Sources: INSEE (1990INSEE ( , 1999)).

maximum rates that are found among these communes for a given year. In one-third of the communes, more than one-fifth of the active population was unemployed in 1999. The situation is even more dramatic when the young population is concerned. Let us, again, take the example of Mantes-la-Jolie (one of the 'historical' sites of urban policy as a report qualified it) and also the commune of Garges-le `s-Gonesse, both of them in the Paris region. The neighbourhood of Le Val Fourre ´in Mantes-la-Jolie has been included in urban policy since the policy's inception in 1982. The social housing neighbourhoods of Garges-le `s-Gonesse has been included since 1984. The former experienced incidents in 1991 and the latter in 1991, March 1994, June 1994and 1995. As Table 3 shows, the young population is hit even more severely by increasing unemployment. To take another example, in 1999, 40.5 per cent of the active population consisting of young people aged between 15-24 were unemployed in the priority neighbourhoods of Vaulx-en-Velin. Indeed, the unemployment rates for young people in Mantes-la-Jolie and Garges-le `s-Gonesse presented in Table 3 are not among the highest, although they are quite high, especially given that these have been 'priority neighbourhoods' and have been the subject of 'positive discrimination' for two decades now. When all the priority neighbourhoods of urban policy are taken into consideration, the unemployment rates of young people are higher than the figures above: 28.5 per cent for 1990 and 39.5 per cent in 1999.

What these figures suggest is that there is an embedded unemployment problem, constantly aggravating and hitting, more than any other place, the