The riots in France continued last night, albeit at lower intensity than the night before. They appear to be spreading, metastasizing beyond Paris to dozens of French cities, and now have sparked a few events outside France. There have been millions of bytes of text written about the riots already, by many people far more knowledgeable about the situation in France than I. If I can offer anything new to the discussion, it’s just to point out the similarities between the French riots and the riots by African-Americans in the late 1960s in the United States. In both cases, there is a poor class with high unemployment, particularly among the youth. In France, as in the United States, the first response to the riots by the government and the press (beyond anger at the rioters) was discussion about how horrible those economic conditions were, and some token redevelopment projects in the slums were proposed to try to rectify the economic disparity. It’s good to remember, however, that poverty alone does not breed riots. In France today, note that it isn’t first generation immigrants who are rioting, but second or third-generation immigrants, who are generally a little better off. Similarly, in the United States the large barrios of Hispanic immigrants have historically not had problems with riots (with the possible exception of the Zoot Suit Riots), while many of the African-American communities that have been poor for generations seem just as likely to have a riot today as in 1992 (the last major riot in Los Angeles).
A riot requires not just poverty but a prevailing sense of injustice among a people, whether from police abuse or from job discrimination (as in both France and the US). This sense of not really belonging to a society, and not really having any say in the political process, is just as important to the formation of a riot as the economic component. It is, unfortunately, much more difficult to change, which is why governments tend to respond to riots by just addressing the economic component and ignore the issue of racism.
There’s another important lesson that came out of the 1960s U.S. riots and is now apparent in the French riots: the failure of modern urban planning. The French made a decision to construct large affordable housing projects out in the Paris suburbs, and did it the cheapest possible way, using tall skyscrapers that I’ve heard referred to in French as “bunny cages”, to describe how cramped and ugly they are. Similarly, the U.S. constructed large skyscrapers in huge projects in urban areas in Chicago and New York. These projects are now widely recognized as failures. The concentration of poverty, whether by affordable housing projects or more subtle techniques like zoning, multiplied the problems caused by poverty many times over. While newer housing projects in the U.S. and France recognize this and are generally more dispersed across a region, the old projects mostly persist as a blight on the landscape. There’s a real need for a wholesale dismantling of these projects, either physically (by demolition) or socially (by redeveloping portions of the projects). This won’t happen overnight- it took 20 years to build the “bunny cages”, and it will take at least that long to construct an equal number of affordable housing units in more dispersed settlements.
The reason this is so important is that cultural assimilation of poor groups into the broader society, the stated goal of both the French and the U.S. governments, is impossible without physical proximity. Immigrant neighborhoods form naturally for first-generation immigrants, and are invaluable for survival in their new country. However, after the first generation, or in the case of native poor groups such as the African-American urban poor, government policy must enable the movement of people into the broader society. Currently, both U.S. and French policy aim, effectively, to isolate their poor from the broader society, with disastrous results.
via Hamlets Dreams
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