Explaining community participation in the field of security: social and territorial differentiations between and within neighbourhoods in France and Italy

Explaining community participation in the field of security: social and territorial differentiations between and within neighbourhoods in France and Italy

[SHS:SCIPO] Humanities and Social Sciences/Political science

Comparative analysis

community participation

France

Italy

This paper aims to deal with community participation in the field of security in France and Italy, and particularly to investigate the relationship between the Physical and the Social thanks to a comparison between two case studies: the “Projet Grenoble Sud” (“South Grenoble Project”) in Grenoble (France) and the “Progetto Città Sicure” (“Safe City Project”) in Modena (Italy). My contribution is based on my PhD research in progress about local security policies in both countries, focussing on four cities (Lyon and Grenoble in France; Bologna and Modena in Italy).<br />Community participation in Modena -which can be qualified as “problem-solving oriented”- is based on networks of “sentinels” who keep neighbourhoods and the police action under supervision. It results from a bottom up process, that is to say spontaneous citizens' mobilizations on security problems that occurred in the mid-nineties, in the national context of political party crisis and rising of immigration flux. On the opposite, the community participation pattern in Grenoble results from a top down process, driven by the local government who leads a consultative process that enables people to make proposals to improve security in their neighbourhoods, and then to maintain control over the effective implementation of the retained proposals. This mode of community participation can be qualified as “program-building and implementation-controlling”. <br />I claim that the differences between these two patterns of community participation lie in the relationships between the physical and the social dimensions of neighbourhoods, which define the process of (re)building local identities based on the exclusion of “outgroups” (Elias and Scotson, 1965) and therefore influences the framing of the social demand of security by the local government. As a generalization, I support the hypothesis that in Emilia-Romagna, the social differentiation between residents and (immigrant) delinquents allows community participation based on the idea of reconquering public spaces within neighbourhoods, whereas in France, where the reconquest of public spaces seems more supported by public authorities than by inhabitants, deprived city suburbs called “banlieues” embody the consequences of an uneasy social differentiation, in discourses as well as in policies. These poor suburbs are physically delimited places where delinquents live and act, and are therefore stigmatized by the rest of the local population who live in other neighbourhoods. The political tensions created by the Interior Minister's description of urban vandals as “racaille” (“scum” or “rabble”), a few months before the beginning of urban violence that have been wracking these suburbs for two weeks, have recently well illustrated this idea. Building a collective social differentiation is so uneasy in France that individual responses such as moving (Roché, 2002) lead to a territorial differentiation whose real victims are residents who remain there. <br />Therefore, historical and cultural explanations are useful to understand this differential of collective action: the building in discourses and policies of immigrant delinquents “outgroups” is easier in Italy because it is a more recent immigration country that has little colonial past. It's all the more easy in Emilia-Romagna as this Region belongs to the “Third Italy” (Putnam et al., 1993), where old homogeneous and integrated working class neighbourhoods still exist, where new immigrants are more equally distributed on the territory and where corporate actors in the field of safety are not systematically placed under suspicion unlike France, a “strong” state, where this kind of mobilization is often associated with denouncement and militia, what we could call the “syndrome of Vichy”. It is a question of degree: mobilization of second class inhabitants in deprived neighbourhoods is always a challenge for local governments, even in the UK with more grass roots associations.

Germain, Séverine

ECPR Joint Session, April 2006<br />Workshop n. 15: Neighbourhood Politics, Policymaking and the Discourse of Community Participation

2006-04-25

ENG

conference, seminar, workshop communication

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00374016

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/37/40/16/PDF/paper.Germain.pdf

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/37/40/16/PDF/Appendix.germain.pdf

Nicosie

Cyprus