Les Quartiers d'Exil (Neighborhoods of Exile) by François Dubet and Didier Lapeyronnie tries to explain neighborhoods with problems of exclusion, that is to say those in the periphery. The book is divided into seven chapters, somewhat poorly defined and too repetitive, followed by a conclusion:
1. From the social question to social problems
2. Decline of the red neighborhoods and juvenile deviance
3. Immigration and minorities
4. La galère (minor youthful deviance)
5. Young immigrants
6. Between territories and the market
7. Politics and social policies
Conclusion
In order to explain the problems of exclusion, they go further than immigration and unemployment in their search for the source of failure for those who live in these neighborhoods. Of course unemployment and social failure are problems that characterise French peripheral neighborhoods, but the social problems are, according to the authors, the result of a deeper change in society. They cite the abscence of collectivity, caused by the drop in importance of the working class through the reorientation towards a postindustrial economy, as the factor which leads to problems of exclusion.
According to Dubet and Lapeyronnie, it used to be the confrontational dialog of the working class and its unions which lead to inclusion. Organization around work formed a consciousness of community which offered a means for revendications within the republican system. Once the working class began to diminish and social problems shifted to immigrants, above all the Algerians, the working class dialog no longer worked and marginal groups have not found a new mecanism to force their inclusion. They explain:
In industrial society, all the discourse and social rhetoric insist
on the usefullness of a poverty which is perceived as an indirect
form of exploitation: the poverty of some founded the wealth of
others. Today, poverty and exclusion of some doesn't have any useful
function, and the excluded don't identify themselves at all with the
discourse of the worker's movement. They fight mostly against racism,
against scholastic exclusion, against urban marginalization. The
movements of the peripheral neighborhoods only have a very distant
connection with the worker's movement.
p. 27
It is not then simply an economic crisis which leaves people unemployed, but rather a social structure which has set them aside. The reorientation toward a deindustrialized society no longer needs the labor of these immigrants and doesn't have any use for these people who are not part of French society. Thus they become marginalized.
Much of the book describes the means by which the youth of the peripheral neighborhoods try to integrated themselves into French society, with the fights against racism, scholastic exclusion and urban marginalization. They also explain the social problems of the peripheral neighborhoods as a means of looking for inclusion through frustration: delinquence and revolt are means to force a form of inclusion.
The delinquants are often amoung the most culturally assimilated youth. Their transgressions result from the frustration felt from "not being able to live normally" and not being able to succeed in entering the labor force despite their assimilation. They use illegal means to achieve conformist goals.
The actions of those in the peripheral neighborhoods are not solely riots and car theft, and the authors also speak about the efforts to organise movements, like the one against racism. These efforts are chronically weakened by a lack of community among the excluded. The authors attribute this abscence to the lack of homogeneity in the neighborhoods, the cultural distance between immigrants and their children, the inability to choose a direction. The anti-racist movement had a fair deal of success, as it addressed the theme of exclusion that all feel, but when it tried to convert itself into a movement for the peripheral neighborhoods it lost its force. Movements based on territories don't find support because of the heterogeneity of the neighborhoods that hampers efforts to find representatives, and suspicions surround people as soon as they enter the political scene.
This book goes a long way in examining the problems of integration in peripheral neighborhoods, but at the same time it takes a tone sometimes paternalistic toward the immigrants. The insistance on the differences between the youth culture of the working class and that of the youth of the peripheral neighborhoods seems to be to be looking for differences that don't exist, or at least are less important than the authors indicate. Whether they're trying to recapture a romanticism for their own youth, or trying to underline a difference in character between the Algerians and the delinquants of a more traditional France, I have no idea.
They try to attach too much importance to cultural difficulties and don't look enough at the spatialization of exclusion. They explain stigmatization well enough, but they barely talk about the policy of concentrating public housing, nor do they underline the problem of they way in which the excluded are pushed to the periphery where transportation to the city center is poortly served. They do a good job of demonstrating the danger of attaching too much importance on the physical condition of housing without addressing the social problems. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't look at the spatio-structural relations of the city. To really explain stigmatization, it is necessary to note that the identification of these neighborhoods does not come solely from the characteristics that they note like poverty and the concentration of immigrants, but rather from the location as well. These neighborhoods are the "banlieues", the French word for peripheral neighborhoods itself carries the stigma.
In effect, they often repeat their hypothesis that the peripheral neighborhoods are inflicted with this loss of worker solidarity, but the don't have any good evidence to demonstrate it. You only read a series of conjectures. There is no explanation of how the result -- the concentration of social problems on a group that society has racialized and in the neighborhoods most poorly served by municipal services -- would have been different had the industrialization of the country continued. It seems to me that there would have been a new working class formed of racialized immigrants, exploited and exiled in the same manner to the edges of the city.