Marseille from North to South

The decision taken by six families to squat a vacant house in downtown Marseille in 1946, the formation of a neighborhood committee in Saint-Charles (1^er district) in 1950, the organization of an “elevator ball” in Saint-Barthélemy (14^e district) in 1982 and the creation of a hip-hop group (B.Vice) in La Savine (15^e arrondissement) in 1989: are these micro-events part of a common history? Minayo Nasiali, assistant professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, answers in the affirmative in this book presenting Marseille residents who, whatever their origin or nationality, have been able to assert locally, for fifty years, a social citizenship concerned with improving an often difficult urban environment.

The history of housing in France is a widely scrutinized field of study, with research focusing on state and centralized urban renovation and rehabilitation initiatives, highlighting the role of ministries and senior officials on specific groups (Portuguese, Algerians), on organizations (the SONACOTRA for example) or on the “urban pathologies” born of so-called “sensitive” neighborhoods and “large housing estates”. In this area, Minayo Nasiali innovates by placing housing at the heart of the struggles for social citizenship. She demonstrates how local debates around housing and urban planning have helped to restructure, since the end of the Second World War, the relations between citizens and the State. She also believes that the colonial Empire shapes this process over time: the demands of the colonized or formerly colonized populations are as tenacious in this area as the discrimination they suffer.

In fact, the historian places herself in the interstices of the historiography of housing in France, a bit like the “ordinary people” she studies organize their struggles in the poor interstices of the city. The history of these struggles is then scrutinized from the daily negotiations between residents of different Marseille neighborhoods, local and national elected officials, technocrats and other experts (demographers, sociologists, urban planners), thanks to various sources including archival documents, press articles and an oral survey. Although the periodization adopted is classic, the first part (“Modernizing the Imperial City”) focusing globally on the “Thirty Glorious Years” and the second part (“The Welfare State in Decline?”) on the end of these, Minayo Nasiali gives us an understanding of mechanisms which, while always marked by their context, go beyond this simple chronology.

Ordinary people and their small victories

Throughout the second 20^e century (1945-2000), urban planning in Marseille, as in other French cities, was subject to multiple and recurring crises: housing shortages in the immediate post-war period (32,000 families without housing in 1946), temporary accommodation that became permanent in shanty towns, accommodation camps or transit cities in the 1950s and 1960s, “sarcellitis” (from the name given to this “neurosis” from which residents of large housing estates can suffer) and urban violence in large housing estates in the 1970s and 1980s. During these crises, residents mobilized to improve their daily lives. In the late 1940s, they created a “squatters’ agreement committee”, which brought together nearly 500 squats in the Marseille metropolitan area in 1949. In the 1950s, “neighborhood interest committees” were set up, associations intended to serve as interlocutors between the residents of a neighborhood and local elected officials on various subjects such as roads, neighborhoods, cleanliness, etc. A residents’ collective in Saint-Barthélémy, a disadvantaged neighborhood with large housing estates, was still established in 1982, and cultural mediators and youth and culture centers gradually appeared in Marseille. Petitions, individual letters addressed to the mayor and in particular to Gaston Deferre (mayor from 1953 to 1986), interviews requested with the authorities: all means were mobilized to obtain rights, improve living conditions and participate in neighborhood reorganization plans. The welfare state is also shaped from below.

Many “improbable encounters” take place between residents of the same neighborhood, without distinction of origin. Metropolitans, European migrants, colonial subjects speak the same language and claim the same right to housing, well before the solidarities of May 68. Catholics (with the Popular Movement of Families) and communists (through the CGT) help the squatters together. We then discover that many colonized families are demanding in their letters to the mayor an improvement in their housing conditions: these families are fighting alongside their metropolitan neighbors, according to the same methods and with the same objectives. Thus, in 1960, Slimane T. appeals to the mayor to obtain a “comfortable house or at least a house with toilets”. In his letter, he presents himself as a successful construction worker (6 days of work per week) and as a solid pillar of his large family (4 children); he states that his wife is an exemplary housewife and insists on the historical services rendered by his family to France. In short, he is an active citizen and a productive member of the nation.

The ideological basis of these daily struggles, individual or more collective, evolves over time. At the end of the war, if housing is seen as a universal human right, it gradually becomes a right reserved for citizens and more particularly for deserving citizens. In the 1980s, it is a question of associating local residents, especially young people, with new projects, then of promoting multiculturalism. These daily micro-struggles are punctuated by “small victories” (p. 118), but also by real failures.

“Logics of exclusion”

Minayo Nasiali demonstrates how, in this construction from below of social citizenship, the “logics of exclusion” – to borrow the title of a book by Norbert Elias – are as numerous as they are discreet. First, the old residents are frequently hostile to the new ones and demand priority in residential mobility. This is how Arnaud R., president of the Saint Charles residents’ association, can affirm to the newly installed inhabitants: “We, the residents, aware of our needs and our rights, demand the eviction of the nomads.”

Second, ethnic and racial differences are regularly reactivated, in the context of decolonization as in later periods, both by institutions and by the inhabitants themselves. This is true of policies designed to rehouse squatters: metropolitan families are sent to housing HBM Or HLM when “North African” families are increasingly driven to the camps of Grand Bastide and Grand Arenas. This is also true of the policies of shanty town clearance. When the families of Peysonnel are labelled, classified and generally sent to transit cities, the “North African” residents are described as “Algerians” or vice versa: nationality becomes a primary criterion of classification and discrimination.

Thirdly, political affiliation plays a more specific role in the case of Marseille: residents never hesitate to use patronage and many communists complain of being disregarded in their demands, as during the collapse of the building in the Saint-Lazare district on 26 June 1960. The system of “nodding” and “winking” – euphemisms by which the people of Marseille refer to patronage – works to the full, although always denied by politicians.

Crossing social micro-boundaries

From then on, many micro-borders separate residents who are nevertheless fighting for similar projects. The divisions can come from the base (from the building, from the neighborhood), as when in 1984, neighbors protested against the appointment of a guard “son of a harki” by the SONACOTRA and obtain the nomination of a Tunisian, which leads the harkis to protest in turn… But the divisions can also come from the scientific sphere: the work carried out within theINED on the “tolerance threshold” or on “social rebalancing” – in other words on the proportion of foreigners or precarious families not to be exceeded in collective housing – are then taken up by the national authorities as, at the local level, by the residents, to justify certain discriminations.

Finally, the divisions are always instrumentalized by the political sphere. Gradually, the clashes between local residents become more ideological due to the rise in economic uncertainties. The “bus 72 massacre” (an Algerian suffering from mental problems kills the driver of a bus and injures many passengers on August 25, 1973), the murder of a young 17-year-old Comorian, founder of B. Vice (Ibrahim Ali Abdallah) near La Savine, on February 21, 1995, are all events instrumentalized to highlight the issues of neighborhood tensions in the 1970s and 1980s.

The urban policies implemented under François Mitterrand (1981-1995) brought a renewal to Marseille neighborhoods when sociologists, politicians and residents tried to promote “living together”, as well as practical and daily social citizenship. The help given to young people in the musical and artistic fields bears witness to this: the opening of a music school, the rise of hip-hop (dance, songs, tags), the involvement of young people in neighborhood associations are all examples of a creative energy driven at the local level and the refusal to allow unwanted policies to be imposed. This is also illustrated by the long-term commitment of certain local figures such as Françoise Ega who, for several years, worked hard in the city of Grand Saint-Barthélemy where she created associations (including the Amicale générale des travailleurs antillais et guyanais), demanded the improvement of the public transport system, the creation of a cultural centre, and even the repair of an elevator, which gave rise to the “elevator ball”, organised to collect the funds necessary to get it back up and running.

As an epilogue, Minayo Nasiali opens a window on the new debates around the urban revitalization launched in the 2000s in Marseille to make – or remake – the city and its region a “California of Europe”. She then demonstrates that, like Sisyphus, “ordinary people” never stop acting to change their daily lives. On a political level, the book undoubtedly offers arguments to oppose to those who still doubt the usefulness of the right to vote for foreigners at the local level, long promised by a part of the left and systematically rejected. On a scientific level, it presents housing as an essential matrix of the social and ecological struggles of the 20^e century in France, struggles aimed at improving the quality of the urban environment in all its forms. It also invites us to break down the barriers between research on social groups and institutions through a history that constantly intersects with different objects, such as the welfare state, nationalities, social classes, housing, associations, ecology, etc. But it also gives us the desire to explore more individual trajectories to follow the exit from these cycles experienced in the same neighborhood, but not necessarily by the same individual. In fineit enriches the popular history recently brought by Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, a story of “struggles and dreams”.