Thesis supervisors: Yoan Miot and Valérie Sala Pala
This thesis aims to examine the urban renewal currently underway in France through the lens of urban political economy approaches. The central idea of this work is to understand urban renewal as part of a process of commercializing neighborhoods that are home to large social housing complexes inherited from the Trente Glorieuses. Large social housing complexes can be considered as spaces that, since their construction, have been dominated by public and semi-public ownership of land and housing stock built using public and semi-public capital, operating in an administered rather than purely commercial manner.
Initially designed for the intermediate segments of the housing market, these housing complexes and the neighborhoods that host them have undergone a process of devaluation that needs to be characterized, with an emphasis on its effects on the positioning of these spaces and rental parks in the residential markets. Through the large-scale demolition and reconstruction policy it introduces, urban renewal puts an end to the absence of major land and real estate changes that has characterized large social housing estates since their creation. It anchors these spaces in a new cycle of urban production, marked by the intervention of private real estate operators, as part of the diversification of the housing supply desired by the National Agency for Urban Renewal, with a view to diversifying the population of these neighborhoods. The thesis will examine all the changes made to the housing supply in large housing estate neighborhoods, focusing both on the restructuring of their social housing stock and the introduction of non-social housing in various forms. In particular, it will document the strategies and practices implemented by public and semi-public actors involved in urban renewal projects to produce such diversification in the housing supply, and in particular to encourage the involvement of private actors in urban development in these areas, which were initially considered unattractive. The concept of urban rents will be useful in understanding the mechanisms put in place by public actors to secure and make profitable private real estate operations. The thesis will therefore focus on how urban renewal contributes to the expansion of commercial modes of urban production, as well as on the social and spatial effects of these processes. Finally, it will explore the links between the mechanisms of population growth and the different modes of structuring real estate markets and designing private real estate operations that are at work in the context of urban renewal. In order to better understand all of these transformations, the thesis seeks to reinsert the urban renewal carried out since 2003 into the history of urban policy and the trajectory of the large housing estates studied, particularly through the prism of their positioning in the real estate markets. This part of the research is based on archival work, which has enabled the collection of documents detailing the conditions under which large housing estates were built and the interventions that their housing stock has benefited from as part of urban policy, as well as information relating to the conduct of urban renewal in these neighborhoods. The investigation into urban renewal carried out as part of the National Urban Renewal Program and the New National Urban Renewal Program is based on interviews with those involved in urban renewal projects, the collection of documents, and quantitative research.
Year of enrollment: 2022
Doctoral school: City, Transport and Territories – VTT