Metropolitics

Policing Social Housing in Paris: The Role of GPIS

Virginie Malochet & translated by Oliver Waine — 2021-05-28T05:00:00Z

Social landlords in France recently obtained the right to organize surveillance and security operations themselves within their properties. Virginie Malochet studies the case of GPIS, a social-housing security force founded in 2004 in Paris, and explores the rationale and nature of this kind of policing, which reflects both the rise of security concerns and the increased involvement of social-housing organizations in the process of ensuring urban security.
In social-housing neighborhoods in

- From the Field / policing, surveillance, social housing, Paris, public housing, profession, housing projects, night, security, public order, France

Educating Tenants: A Historic Remit of Social Housing

Danièle Voldman & translated by Oliver Waine — 2020-04-17T05:00:00Z

In France, the professions of social worker and concierge both emerged in the early 20th century, and both responded to a central concern of social landlords: educating their tenants in the standards of “good living.” Danièle Voldman retraces the history of these community-based professions, and the role they played in supervising the working classes in social housing.
From the beginning of the 20th century, when the first social-housing tenants started to move into their new homes, both

- Essays / history, housing, social housing, public housing, tenants, profession, France, Paris

The “Dozois Plan”: lessons learned from urban-renewal policies and the history of urban planning in Montreal

Frédéric Mercure-Jolette & translated by Oliver Waine — 2015-10-23T05:00:00Z

Urban-renewal policies justify their actions by decrying neighbourhoods earmarked for demolition. Frédéric Mercure-Jolette seeks to demonstrate this via the little-studied example of the massive operations affecting downtown Montreal in the 1960s. His article also highlights the inextricable links between urban renewal and the paradoxical institutionalization of professional urban planning.
The Projet de rénovation d'une zone d'habitat défectueux et de construction d'habitation à loyer

- Essays / housing, urban planning, housing projects, urban policy, urban renewal, Montreal, slum, profession, development, Canada, salubrity, public action

Starchitects: walking the line between individuality and conformity

Géraldine Molina & translated by Oliver Waine — 2015-02-19T05:50:00Z

The stars of the worlds of architecture and urban planning are prime targets of research, with the aim of understanding the imaginative processes involved in the production of our cities. Géraldine Molina takes a closer look at today's “starchitects” and shows how they have helped to personalise thinking and action regarding the city over the last three decades, while at the same time – and somewhat paradoxically – leading to a certain normalisation of practices.
---- Series: The Renewed

- Essays / architecture, urban planning, profession, star system, distinction, urban project, model, conformity

Beirut: the city beneath the surface

Céline Barrère & translated by Oliver Waine — 2013-10-23T04:55:00Z

The geographer Éric Verdeil distances himself from the dominant analyses that constantly depict Beirut as a “city at war”. Instead, he considers the way the Lebanese capital has been planned and developed, seeing urban planning as a process that mirrors territories and produces narratives and challenges arising from struggles between social groups.
Éric Verdeil, shunning the usual discourse on Beirut and Lebanon focusing on the civil war, has taken the novel approach of considering the war as

- Reviews / urban planning, Lebanon, Beirut, profession, state

Regulating public spaces: the ambiguous role played by new professions

Jacques de Maillard & translated by Oliver Waine — 2013-04-17T13:52:12Z

Despite a hiatus in the debate on community policing in France, the “new professions” involved in regulating public order have been the subject of renewed interest of late. Jacques de Maillard has studied the work of correspondants de nuit (“night-time mediators”) in Paris, and here describes how an alternative – a compromise between repression and abandonment – has been sought.
In the early 1990s, initiatives to manage conflict in public places, on public transport and in social-housing

- From the Field / public space, safety, Paris, proximity, profession, policing, security, public order