So, a lot is currently going on in France. There are still undoing protest thanks to the guy that was killed by police in Nanterre, a banlieue of Paris. For those who do not now, a banlieue is sort of a suburb of a city, but mostly those are areas with a lot of poverty.
With my academic background, this current situation really made me dive into the banlieues as a whole. Within Europe, at least as far as I’m aware, something similar doesn’t really exist. It’s more or less unique to France.
So what happened there is such a massive difference between the rich and thriving city centre of Paris, and it’s suburbs? That was the question I set out to answer for myself.
The first and a quite important thing I stumbled upon, is Plan Borloo. This is a report from 2018 that proposes several ways to improve the Banlieues. Some things that caught my attention are:
- Lack of public transport
- Education
- More police/preventing crime
- Sport programs
- More support for single parent families
What also stood out to me, is how Macron threw this plan in the bin, his argumentation you might ask?
“I won’t have some big Banlieue plan, what is the point if 2 white guys not living in a Banlieue, present each other reports about them”
While, okay, okay, I get his point. People from the Banlieues should have definitely have imput and be included in making it a better place. I do as well agree that if they just enforce a ‘solution’ top-down (so policy from politicians without including the actual people), that won’t be successful. But come on Macron, that report was an opening, an opening to start that conversation about what needs to be done. In 1500 of these Banlieues live 6 million people, 6 million people of which most live in a terrible situation they can’t seem to get out, and it seems like politicians just don’t care that much. People from Banlieues face a lot of judgement, they aren’t given any opportunity to get themselves to a better place. It’s rough.
Mayors of the banlieues try to get the attention of national politicians, recently again about housing issues, unfortunately to very little success. While there are so many problems in those Banlieues that could and should be solved. And just for context, plan Borloo would roughly cost 2 billion euros yearly, seems like a lot of money, but it would improve a lot. And to put it in perspective, they don’t have any issues spending €19.7 billion for Ukraine. (Absolutely not me saying Ukraine shouldn’t recieve (financial) assistance, they definitely should, but my point is, in comparison 2 billion yearly is not that much on the whole France bugdet, they certainly would be able to invest in the Banlieues if they wanted to.)
It’s not only recently though these suburbs seem to be ignored by politicians, it’s an ongoing thing. This situation didn’t get this far in a few years, more so decades. Decades of suburbs being ignored by national politicians.
But yeah, the death of that guy by police, it was sort of that last straw for a lot of people I think. So it doesn’t surprise me how especially in the Banlieues it lead to a whole lot of protests and stuff. If you’re constantly forgotten about, seen as less, that raises tension. Something like what happened in Nanterre, in such an already tense situation, it messes things up.
(Also, can I express how disgusted I feel that there has been more money collected for the police officer who was just a racist discriminatory guy, than for the family of the guy who should have never been killed)
This is quite a different topic from me, I know, but I wanted to spread some awareness about this as well as just share my insights on this and hopefully get some interesting replies in return!
Also, a disclaimer, I do not claim at all I understand the full extent of what is going on, I am not French, I’m not from a banlieue and have not been to one. I have tried to do my research, but please correct me if I’m wrong!
