Quartiers Populaires and Banlieues: The Spatial Lexicon of French Structural Racism

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY CHANELLE ADAMS

In the context of this issue, it was important for us to bring up two terms central to the struggle against (spatialized) structural racism in France: “banlieues” and “quartiers populaires.”Both would lose significant parts of their meaning if they were translated or thought with anglophone equivalents, which is why it was important for us and for our translator, Chanelle Adams to actively refuse their translation in this text we commissioned to Mathieu Rigouste whose work on the matter has had a strong influence on us for the past decade.

An obsessive gaze looms over quartiers populaires. Governments, mainstream media, and social scientists all observe and scrutinize these neighborhoods and their inhabitants. This targeted way of looking serves to legitimize dominion over those on the peripheries of imperial centers of power, aiming to silence them and impede their right to lead dignified lives. What are the conditions under which we can think about quartiers populaires in a rigorous and critical way? And could the exercise of questioning this terminology offer tools in service of our struggles for liberation?

Quartiers populaires and banlieues: What, who, and where? ///

Like all social practices, the meanings and connotations of these words differ according to the history, politics, and societal position of those who use them. In this text, I attempt to define them on the basis of my own experience, including my use of them in critical research, to explore the ways they are recruited in neighborhood and immigration struggles.

I grew up in a banlieue of Paris called Gennevilliers. In the 1980s, it was ravaged by dope, destitution, and many forms of institutional violence. Families of all backgrounds gathered in the center of Le Luth neighborhood to combine their know-how and to share what little they had, often in the form of self-organized barbecues for all. Later, this common ground was destroyed as part of the city’s urban renewal plan which favored securitarian infrastructure over communal life at the turn of the century. Les Izards is a banlieue of Toulouse where I currently live and from where I am writing now. It has some of the highest rates of inequality and precariousness in the country. It is also where several thousand residents of multiple nationalities live together and survive side by side. Young people face violence daily whether at the hands of the police, gun violence in drug deals, or alleged “suicides” in the solitary confinement at Seysses prison outside Toulouse. Even in the midst of all this violence intertwined with the many social forms of domination which structure society, I have seen more mutual aid and solidarity here than I’ve seen in the most privileged neighborhoods of the military-security technopolis.

In my research and activism, I use the term “quartier populaire,” which comes from the adjective populaire (of/from the people) and noun quartier (neighborhood). It is used to describe the precarious living conditions of exploited social classes. I employ this term critically because, similar to the way saying “the people” can be divisive, these notions run the risk of being misinterpreted or mobilized in ways that render social and historical hierarchies invisible—for example, by mixing the dominant and the dominated within a single category. I hold out against this interpretation by insisting that these words always bring attention to forces of domination and resistance. The context and perspective with which these terms are used also matter and depend on each situation. I aim to always situate my position in relation to their designations and use them in service of struggles for collective emancipation. At times, I even alternate swap “quartier populaire” with “quartier prolétaire” (proletarian neighborhood). And on other occasions, I find it necessary to explicitly elaborate when the specificity of each situation comes into play. For example, when the term describes a territory where inhabitants have neither power nor capital and when it describes territories where the mechanization of forced dependency clashes with collective forces seeking autonomy.

Forces of marginalization, discrimination, and socio-racial segregation cut across and unite people in these areas. These forces are only implicit in the notion of “quartiers populaires,” and are made more explicit in that of “banlieue.” Etymologically, banlieue comes from the words “ban,” an area around a feudal town of one-lieue (four kilometers in the former distance unit system) deep. While banlieue often refers to the outskirts of large cities, it can also describe places within large urban centers or the margins of small and medium-sized rural towns. At some points in French history, there are banlieues that were once bourgeois similar to “suburbs” found in some countries now. But in popular culture today, banlieue has a strong connotation of banishment and abandonment.

There is no singular way to describe counterculture and resistance in these territories in a way that encompasses everyone and everywhere. None of these terms succeeds wholly on their own, and none can encompass the complexity, diversity, and realities of these spaces. Since there is no “good usage” that can hold all the material and symbolic dimensions of this reality, we can move forward by continually questioning our practices, and reflect on how these terms might enable or inhibit us from describing our realities and, importantly, whether or not we can organize around them to transform these spaces.

Interwoven Genealogies ///

The notion of “quartiers populaires” is the product of several historically interwoven genealogies. Part of a long history of capitalism, they have been produced through dynamics of dispossession and exploitation, which have concentrated masses of workers on the outskirts of Europe’s bourgeois cities since the 18th-century. Since the neoliberal era, they have become reservoirs of labor subjected to regimes of over-exploitation, and adjustment variables in a policy of mass unemployment and the engineered destruction of public services.

Institutional boundaries that isolate quartiers populaires from the rest of the city are first and foremost devices of capture. Concentrating workers from regions far from major centers of accumulation, nearby countries, former colonies and all over the world, banlieues are produced and reproduced by regimes of socio-racial segregation which have evolved over the course of history. They are places of banishment for those whose lives are under-valued by the state, and whose bodies are deemed expendable. This system of domination, exploitation, segregation, and discrimination is founded upon a socio-racial basis that cuts across and structures all aspects of daily life (such as housing, health, school, work, culture, access to rights) in the home, in the street in the face of violence of the police, prison and borders.

“Banlieues” and “cités” are common names for this regime of endo-coloniality. Cités refer to the structures which are often, but not always, found in banlieues and quartiers populaires. They are made up of towers and slabs of varying sizes, sometimes with insular passageways, and are generally closed in onto themselves. This architecture, called “grands ensembles,” was first experimented with in the former colonies, notably in Algeria and Morocco, before being introduced to metropolitan France.

But quartiers populaires and banlieues are hybrid spaces that inherit metropolitan genealogies and exist in continuity with the management of colonial territories. At the same time, their histories unfold in relation to a configuration of forces specific to imperialist centers.

Mechanisms of patriarchy control representation of banlieues. In dominant and mainstream discourses, inhabitants of banlieues are described as diseased, diminished bodies to be conquered, sown, subjugated, and domesticated. Revolts in the banlieues are likened to irrational emotions, and political formation is depicted as inconceivable. The way people are cast as “hysterical” is not separate from the ways in which patriarchy discredits feminized bodies and ways of knowing. Inhabitants are subjected to all forms of gendered exploitation and segregation, which do not pile up, but rather define modes of domination specific to each situation.

So far, I have mostly written about socio-apartheid to describe the institution of this regime of endo-coloniality across time and space. Different from militarized apartheid of South Africa, occupied Palestine, and other settler colonial contexts, the banlieue regime is nonetheless at the heart of the functioning and reproduction of racialized, patriarchal, capitalist systems. “Banlieue” is the common word used to describe this form of socio-apartheid inscribed along the imperial continuum. Major social relations of domination that underpin contemporary society converge upon the banlieues. Those who benefit the least from the political, economic, and social system survive in the banlieues, which means in other words, those who have the greatest interest in getting rid of it.

Battlefields, laboratories and showcases of security ///

Throughout the neoliberal counter revolution and security engaged in the post-1968 era, the global system has reorganized its dynamics of reproduction with intense investments in long-term and profitable forms of police warfare, from both inside and outside of imperialist centers. Domestic operations were dubbed security measures by the military-industrial complex, and quartiers populaires were seized as battlefields to secure capital accumulation and concentration of power.

By the same token, this regime of domination over banlieues has been fully integrated into the dynamics of mass incarceration. Large number of residents and their families have been subjected to the force of punitive chains and the mechanisms of repeated long-term confinement. These realities are linked to the politics of borders and camps, as well as regimes of exploitation that take place inside prisons.

It is within this context of continuities with the management of colonized territories that quartiers populaires have been seized as laboratories and showcases for the design, experimentation, development and staging of new technologies of security.

Through neoliberal gentrification and security, the banlieues are also submitted to new forms of accumulation through dispossession, where urban renewal acts both in service of urban capitalism and as a mechanism to reinforce systemic segregation. Banlieues are subject to ongoing experimentation with materials and doctrines of control derived from imperial wars in the Global South. Hunting, capture, and strangulation techniques, “non-lethal” mutilating weapons, poison gas, drones, war discourses and mythologies, and hybrid units are all ferociously translated and adapted for the metropolis, and circulate across prisons, camps, and borders.

Interstices, refuges and maquis ///

The obsession with security in banlieues is part of a long-standing historical necessity to subdue disobedience, insubordination, resistance, and counter-attacks which constantly emerge and are reconstituted. During the uprisings for Nahel in Nanterre in June and July of 2023, as in many other banlieues across France and throughout the history of resistance, some young people, particularly those facing daily police violence, were confronted by police units who covered the neighborhood with poison gas, mutilating grenades, and new experimental ammunitions. The insurgents were supported by other people from quartiers populaires. But in informal discussions, such as those held in community spaces or social media, analyses of the situation and what should be done continued to reveal very strong divisions.

In these conversations, we questioned how individualism and consumerism show up, violence between the marginalized, and practices that legitimize and reproduce relations of domination. It seems just as problematic to describe quartiers populaires as threatening places as it is to fetishize them as idyllic. But the structures of contemporary society govern the harshness of life there. And in the face of this violence, multiple struggles and forms of life are constantly emerging.

Let’s remember that banlieues are subjected to policies of crushing precisely because they are also creative centers of power. They are specifically targeted because they offer refuges for the oppressed, and are places where everyday invisibilized solidarity continually takes shape.

As is the case during the uprisings of December 1960 in Algerian cities, and in many revolutionary processes around the world in 2011, 2019, and today, working-class neighborhoods offer refuge from historical forces and become sites where an uncontrollable common body forms. During these moments, the wretched of society sing and dance together in the streets and celebrate taking back territory and shared destinies. In this respect, banlieues are treated as inner matrices of a global threat because they are the sources from which we will forge our future worlds. ■