Renewal and 'Deverticalization' in French Social Housing : The Emblematic Case of the Rhône-Alpes Region
Résumé
The renewal of social housing districts is a process currently underway in a large part of Europe. As the European country with the greatest concentration of tower and slab blocks known as grands ensembles (large housing estates), France has since the early 2000s pursued a policy of large-scale demolition-reconstruction that specifically targets large buildings – notably towers – dating from the period 1965-1974. The latter are now diagnosed as poorly adaptable and badly inhabited in light of the concentration of poor populations in them. In this paper, I provide an assessment of this policy aimed at banalising and 'deverticalizing' social housing districts. For this purpose, I focus on the Rhône-Alpes region, an area fairly representative of the national urban renewal programme that accounts for about 10 per cent of the neighbourhoods concerned.