| Popis: |
This paper suggests regarding « populating » as a new key issue for cities, in the context of neoliberalisation of urban policies and the rise of urban entrepreneurialism. Within this context, it seems as if gentrification strategies were the main translation of the ancient will to control or to act upon the distribution of social groups and to influence residential mobility in urban spaces. In fact, populating issues, taken between “place” and “territory” logics, are more complex and this complexity could be understood with the idea of hybridity of current urban policies which combine elements of neoliberal restructuration and political and institutional legacies from the Fordism period. Saint-Etienne case study, a middle-sized city which recent history has been characterised by deindustrialisation and a significant loss of inhabitants (nearly 50,000 inhabitants left the city since 1968), shows the strengthening of the paradigm of attractiveness within urban policies. As a matter of fact, since the beginning of the 2000s, the City Council has implemented a specific housing environment strategy, whereas “laissez faire” dominated until that period. This strategy is not a one-dimensional gentrification approach but a hybrid one, mingling the concerns of, or some of, the inhabitants ‘already there’ and issues of image and attraction of inhabitants from outside, and particularly at the inter-municipal level. |
