banlieue

Interviews

In Search of Grand Paris: Pierre Mansat on the Eve of the June 2020 Municipal Elections

Magda Maaoui & Pierre Mansat - 26 June 2020
Magda Maaoui interviews Pierre Mansat, former deputy mayor of Paris and a founding father of “le Grand Paris” (the...
Debates

Covid-19, War, and Working-Class Neighborhoods

Pierre Gilbert & translated by Oliver Waine - 5 June 2020
The residents of France’s working-class neighborhoods, accused of exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic through...
From the Field

How the Youth of the Banlieues See the Gilets Jaunes

Ahmed & Baptiste & Hachimia & Jeremy & Karima & Lisa-Marie & Louiza & Thibaut & translated by Oliver Waine - 24 April 2020
Do the “Yellow Vests” and the youth of France’s banlieues share a common vision of the inequalities and discrimination...
Reviews

Aubervilliers: Portrait of a Working-Class Suburb

Anaïs Albert & translated by Oliver Waine - 21 February 2020
The republication of an early-20th‑century realist novel set in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers brings...
Debates

Can Cannabis Be Legalized in France Without Inflaming the Banlieues?

Christian Ben Lakhdar & Aymeric Reyre & translated by Oliver Waine - 5 July 2019
France is a place of paradoxes: cannabis is widely consumed, and yet legalization does not seem to be on the cards,...
Debates

Masculine Sports and “Respectable” Men in Working-Class Neighborhoods

Carine Guérandel & translated by Oliver Waine - 12 March 2019
In a work rich in ethnographic material, Akim Oualhaci questions how socialization through sports contributes to...
From the Field

Photography, Ethnography and Exhibitions in the Projects

Camilo León-Quijano & translated by Oliver Waine - 11 January 2019
Pictures taken by photographer and sociologist Camilo León-Quijano with the initial aim of understanding the...
From the Field

The Americanization of French social movements? Community organizing and its discontents in the banlieues

Julien Talpin - 29 June 2017
In this second of two articles, sociologist Julien Talpin discusses the importation to France of American...
From the Field

What’s the matter with the banlieues? Exploring the importation of the American community organizing tradition by French social movements

Julien Talpin - 22 June 2017
With the eclipse of the once-powerful Communist and Socialist Parties in France, and these parties’ traditional...
From the Field

Rendering a Redeveloped France

Alex Schafran & Giorgia Aiello & Theresa Enright & Yohann Le Moigne - 7 June 2017
As urban redevelopment projects remake the Greater Paris region, it is impossible to separate an avalanche of new...
From the Field

Citizen Outsider: Racism, Marginalization, and Immigration in France

Jean Beaman - 31 May 2017
As refugee crises have emerged and immigration has increased in many regions of the world, several Western...
From the Field

Visual Sociology: Re-Imaging Marseille’s Housing Projects

William Kornblum - 10 July 2015
New York sociologist William Kornblum has brought back pictures of the Marseille Northern Housing Projects—the...
Debates

Using heritage status to combat segregation: the case of French housing estates

Marc Bertier & Hervé Marchal & Jean-Marc Stébé & translated by Oliver Waine - 22 October 2014
Challenging the idea that demolishing housing estates is all it takes to eradicate the social problems with which...
Reviews

How journalists see “the suburbs”: lifting the veil on a cliché

Julie Sedel & translated by Oliver Waine - 10 September 2014
“La banlieue”: in France, few terms convey such a clear and constant image: high-rise social housing, young men “of...
Essays

Another Vision of the Suburbs

Jean-Christophe Bardot & Laurent Devisme & translated by Oliver Waine - 7 May 2014
Images of the urban fringes of French cities often tend either to condemn their ugliness or to revel in a strange...
Essays

Racism: a blind spot in French urban sociology?

Élise Palomares & translated by Oliver Waine - 2 October 2013
Why has the analysis of interethnic relations been so long ignored by French urban sociology? For Élise Palomares,...
Debates

The Negotiated Urbanism of Grand Paris Express

Lara Belkind - 12 June 2013
In the fragmented context of Paris’s metropolitan and regional politics, the Grand Pari(s) design consultation and...
Essays

The media construction of the suburbs in France: looking back on the 2007 presidential campaign

Jean Rivière & Sylvie Tissot & translated by Oliver Waine - 23 May 2012
In the run-up to the recent French presidential elections, the question of la banlieue – the (generally poor)...
Debates

Homosexual City, Homophobic Banlieue?

Éric Fassin & translated by Christina Mitrakos - 9 March 2011
Is homophobia prevalent in social housing projects? Is sexual orientation the new divide between civilizations? Éric...

Series

Urban Wastes, Present and Future
New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic
Cities in the Age of Financialization
Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research
New York Tech Dossier: The Dark Side of New York’s Tech Economy
Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements
Land Rights in the Urban Global South
Climate Change and Social Change
Shrinking Cities

Featured

From the Field

Covid-19 Transformed New York’s Destination Food Markets

Ivana Mellers - 5 October 2021
Ivana Mellers analyzes how New York’s destination markets—key spaces of economic and social interactions—coped during...
Reviews

Filming Ethnic Diversity in New York

Stéphane Tonnelat & translated by Christina Mitrakos - 21 October 2016
Frederick Wiseman’s fortieth documentary film, In Jackson Heights (2015), returns to an urban theme explored in...
From the Field

Looking Inward, Across the Border

Harel Shapira - 19 April 2016
In the constellation of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, groups like the Minutemen, civilians who...
Essays

The Political Aesthetics of Drag

Shaka McGlotten - 13 October 2015
Drag, or the diverse art form and culture of performance that typically plays with gender and sex, is an integral...
Debates

Disarm the Police

Gregory Smithsimon - 29 September 2015
In the current political debates about discriminatory policing, there has been a lack of serious discussion of...
Reviews

The Dangers of Security

Médéric Martin-Mazé & translated by Oliver Waine - 22 May 2015
In Against Security, Harvey Molotch highlights – through various examples, including the New York subway, airports,...

Other resources online

Cycles of Violence: Analysing Media Discourse in the Newspaper...

Mobile Lives Forum
How are cyclist and pedestrian deaths depicted in newspaper reports, and how do these reports help shape...

Lahti: The First Carbon-Rationing Experiment Applied to Local...

Mobile Lives Forum
The city of Lahti in Finland was the first to experiment with a carbon-trading scheme among its inhabitants to...

Is Rationing Carbon for Travel a Fair, Efficient, and Realistic...

Mobile Lives Forum
In the wake of the pandemic, a carbon tax at Europe’s borders is now on the agenda, but a domestic version for...

Reducing Carbon-Emitting Travel: A Factor of Social Cohesion and...

Mobile Lives Forum
As part of France’s Mission on the Future of the Economic Model of Public Transportation, commissioned by the French...

Strasbourg, An Example of a Cycling City

Mobile Lives Forum
Strasbourg is the leading city for cycling in France and a constant source of inspiration for all French cities...

The Trinity of Walking, Cycling and Public Transportation Must Be...

Mobile Lives Forum
While emissions from the transportation sector remain at a very high level, all hopes are currently pinned on the...
Centre national de recherche scientifique
Journal supported by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Institute of Human and Social Sciences) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

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