Public Mobility as the Defining Feature of the French Post-industrial City

Introduction: Neoliberalism, Governmentality and Mobility in the Post-industrial City

It has become difficult to remain motionless in French urban public space. Stopping in the street means remaining standing, or sitting down in places not intended for this (doorsteps, curbs …) since the urban amenities which once made this easy are fast disappearing, with public benches, for example, currently being removed. Remaining motionless in urban public space today means becoming a suspect in the eyes of passers-by or the police, who may intervene to move stationary bodies. As in many other places, the politics and policies of French cities have been deeply affected by a process defined by some authors as a ‘neoliberal turn’ (Jobert, 1994). On the most general level, neoliberalism, as defined by Hayek (1967 [1944]) and Friedman (1962), spread across the world from the early 1970s in an apparently irresistible way (Klein, 2007), marking for some ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992). As a set of economic and social policies, neoliberalism can be defined as a market-driven approach that promises to maximize the role of the private sector through tax cuts, decreases in social spending, deregulation of markets and the privatization of many public goods. However, the neoliberalization of France has been less determined than in the United States under Ronald Reagan or Britain under Margaret Thatcher (Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb, 2002). Prasad explains that, during the Fordist period of the 1960s, American and British tax systems were more progressive than the French, with the French welfare state being the least redistributive (Prasad, 2006). How, then, can one locate neoliberalism at work in France?

As many Foucauldian theorists have argued, macroeconomic policies represent only one aspect of neoliberalism. As Marx realized, market society cannot create itself. The advent of homo economicus – an isolated individual only concerned with the realization of its self-interest – supposes that individuals change their behaviour, and this elicits a new role for the state (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]). In other words, the extension of neoliberal political rationality implies a shift in what Foucault (2001 [1978]) named governmentality – the ‘conduct of conducts’. As Brown sums up:

Neo-liberalism is not simply a set of economic policies; it is not only about facilitating free trade, maximizing corporate profits, and challenging welfarism. Rather, neo-liberalism carries a social analysis which, when deployed as a form of governmentality, reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to education policy to practices of empire. (Brown, 2003: 7)

According to Charazac (2010), the recent evolution of work management in both the French public and private sectors reflects such a neoliberal shift in the regulation of workers’ conduct. Four specific logics characterize the new management: a logic of individualization; the rejection of under-performance; a logic of objectives and their maximization; and, finally, a logic of adaptation and mobility. It is the focus especially on the last of these which provides the particular character of the French version of neoliberalism, as the general quest for acceleration and extension of mobility comes to be its distinctive element. Mobility clauses are now routinely part of professional and executive contracts in France, where the state has also recently extended the geographical scale of the compulsory job search for unemployed people receiving unemployment benefits. Lefebvre saw this happening:

The dominant classes today use space like an instrument. A multi-purpose instrument: to disperse the working classes, to distribute them in designated places, to organize the various flows by subordinating them to institutional rules – to thus subordinate space to power – to control space and to govern the whole of society technocratically, by preserving the capitalist relations of production. (Lefebvre, 2000 [1972]: 155)

From Restricted to General Mobility

As Harvey (1989) famously demonstrates, the history of capitalism is characterized by an increasing ‘time-space compression’ which originated in the Renaissance and accelerated in the mid-19th century. However, such a process was far from smooth, and in response to this imperative of the capitalist system several ‘strategies’ to accelerate the urban flows, as well as various ‘tactics’ – in the sense de Certeau (1984) gives of both notions – aiming at restricting them were successively implemented to regulate mobility on the urban scale. These shifts in the regulation of the mobilities can be analysed by using a political economic approach. In France, the coming of the Fordist period marked the apogee of two partly interdependent processes: the industrialization of the economy, and the nationalization of political and economic space. By contrast, the post-Fordist period is characterized by the rise of the services in the national economy and by the political adjustment of the regulatory power of the central state between national and local scales, the latter being increasingly interrelated across the globe. As Brenner convincingly demonstrates, ‘glocalizing’ state institutions contribute to the re-concentration of capacities for economic development within strategic subnational sites such as metropolises and city-regions (Brenner, 2003; Pinson, 2009; Le Galès, 2011). Such a complex evolution has deeply affected the politics of mobility in the former industrial cities.

In the mid-19th century, the French industrial city was the site of a specific regulation of mobilities. At the apogee of French industrial production, the local dominant classes had a clear interest in the restriction of the mobility of the workers but were confronted with a statist ‘strategy’ of increased mobility on a national scale. They deployed several ‘tactics’ aimed at regulating the mobility of the workers within the perimeter of the industrial city in order to limit the attractiveness of the neighbouring industries for ‘their’ workforce. The urbanization of the industrial city itself aimed at routinizing and narrowing the mobility of the local working class in a context of increased opportunities for mobility (Frey, 1986; Rousseau, 2008). This disconnection between local and national strategies of mobility in the 19th century continued through to the second half of the 20th century. After the industrial recession of the 1970s and 1980s, the local dominant classes found themselves confronted with the maladjustment of their city to the requirements of post-Fordist capitalism. To the local and city administrations increasingly concerned with urban competition, the low-scaled and routinized mobilities inherited from the Fordist period came to appear as a crucial problem. Today, the re-adaptation of the post-industrial city to the requirements of neo-capitalism is increasingly seen as dependent on a rescaling of the mobilities of its inhabitants, this time at the regional and global level. Indeed, following a trend which first emerged in the ‘global cities’, the industrial cities, which in France have recently been merged into new metropolitan areas, are being partially rebuilt according to the tastes of a hypermobile new middle class, while the alleged narrowly-scaled mobility of the pauperized urban population inherited from the Fordist period is increasingly seen as problematic.

Even if neoliberalism has affected other social and economic policies implemented at the urban scale in France, the rescaling of urban mobility appears as a crucial part of the restructuration of French post-industrial cities. Post-war countercultural movements denounced suburban life and its routines such as commuting. This opposition to Fordist routines helped to undermine a regime already confronting increasing social and economic contradictions. Once marginal and subversive, the countercultural praising of the dérive would be gradually reappropriated in the post-Fordist era, as the value of ‘free’ mobility through the combined power of ubiquitous media (Featherstone, 2009) and advertising was celebrated. As Laurent Jeanpierre points out, the celebration of mobility becomes characteristic of the postmodern age:

Because it incarnated the opposition to any settlement or to any nostalgia for the golden age, movement is praised for allowing the meeting of cultures, the emergence of a concrete universalism and a new cosmopolitanism. … Although stemming from another historical era, the modern theories of urban experience which associate ‘flânerie’ (Baudelaire, Benjamin) or ‘dérive’ (Debord) with the sovereignty or the emancipation of the metropolitan subject were rediscovered or re-actualized to reinforce this new ideological configuration. (Jeanpierre, 2005: 330–1)

However, this hegemonic celebration of mobilities does not imply the proclamation of a general reign of the dérive. It only reveals the obsolescence of the narrow mobilities of the Fordist period and the consequent ‘re-regulation’ and rescaling of urban mobilities. During the 1970s, capitalism underwent a major mutation, described as a shift towards ‘flexible accumulation of capital’ characterized by the increased spatial mobility of capital in answer to the crises born of capital over-accumulation (Harvey, 1985). The increased time-space compression, which according to Harvey (1989: 284) describes the postmodern condition, is driven before all by the requirements of the globalized post-Fordist regime of accumulation. In France, the new regime requires a new adaptation of the workforce; however, contrary to the preceding accumulation regime, it is a question of increasing the mobility of what many economists describe as human capital, meaning a highly qualified and flexible workforce (Mincer, 1958). Indeed, where the old Fordist firm was deeply rooted in its local environment, the post-Fordist regime continuously disconnects the sites of conception, production and consumption (Cohen, 2006). As a result, the latter regime perceives differently the location in which workers are employed. Indeed, it requires a flexible core of skilled workers to be mobile at the international scale and an increasing part of the urban population to be mobile at the ‘metropolitan scale’ to work, but also to study and to consume.

The mobile body celebrated by postmodernity is indifferently that of the businessman in transit, of the young urbanite going to places of consumption in the urban space, and of the low-skilled worker who has to fulfil three different part-time jobs in one week, each situated in different spaces and organized during different times of the day. These mobile bodies of the post-Fordist regime go all over the post-industrial metropolis, which appears both as a receptacle and as a powerful vehicle for this rescaling of daily mobility. Indeed, in France as in many Western countries, the adaptation of cities to post-Fordism takes the form of a current economic, social and political integration of formerly separated cities on a regional scale, a process qualified as ‘metropolization’. This process reflects a rescaling of the mobilities inherited from the industrial era, from the national to the transnational one and from the urban to the regional one. The key mobilities of the Fordist era are thus simultaneously accelerated and rescaled.

The merging of Roubaix into the Lille metropolis exemplifies these processes. The profitability of the industrial capital in the Lille agglomeration during the Fordist period depended on different instruments aimed at containing the mobility of the working class inside the local labour pools, simply because local capital itself was immobilized in assets such as factories. One of the most successful tactics implemented by the local capitalist class was the improvement of housing conditions. Thus, the union of the Roubaisian textile industrialists had decided during the Second World War to collect 1 per cent of the whole payroll of Roubaix’s urban area to fund the building of numerous new and relatively comfortable housing estates for their workforce, a system which was soon to be generalized and which resulted in the segmentation of the ‘locked’ labour pools of the Lille agglomeration (Rousseau, 2012). However, the collapse of the local industries from the early 1970s made the whole urban area plummet into a spiral of decline. The diagnosis made by the local industrialists and politicians was that local capitalism was not sufficiently diversified and that the local urbanism, designed above all for the working class, was not sufficiently attractive to attract the service class.

At the same time, the former capitalist class who tried to isolate ‘their’ urban workforce from the competition of the industries of the neighbouring cities dislocated, while a new capitalist class emerged in services, recruiting this time its workforce at the scale of the conurbation and operating at the international scale. As a consequence, the city itself was once again designed as the solution to the crisis of local capitalism. However, this time, it was the construction of numerous urban infrastructures of mobility which was perceived as the new path to growth. The re-adaption of the post-industrial metropolis to the requirements of post-Fordism was perceived as dependent on the renunciation of the old tactic aimed at containing mobilities in favour of a new strategy aimed at redesigning the city according to the acceleration of time and space compression. The point was therefore to break the invisible frontiers between the different labour pools dividing the Lille agglomeration, then to rescale the mobilities inside the conurbation from the urban scale to the metropolitan and regional ones. In 1973, the region’s Schéma Directeur d’Aménagement et d’Urbanisme (the urban planning document describing the general orientations of the territory) set as its main objective ‘the realization of a powerful infrastructure of movement which provides inside the Lille agglomeration … a mobility of men and goods indispensible for the rapid development of the economy’ (SDAU Nord-Pas-de-Calais, 1973). Fully integrated into the metropolitan authority, the municipality of Roubaix has consequently managed to develop transportation infrastructures (several highways and a subway line) in order to open up the city.

Similarly, another mutation was happening on a larger scale. Under the pressure of the new capitalist class operating transnationally (retailing, banking, insurance), the aim was to develop both the metropolitan infrastructures of global mobilities such as the airport and the urban marketing of a connected metropolis through the organization of several mega-events (such as an unsuccessful bid for the 1996 Olympic Games or the staging of the European Capital of Culture in 2004) in order to facilitate the attraction of investments, high-profile professionals and tourists in the formerly industrial regional territory. For example, among multiple initiatives, the president of the chamber of commerce of the Lille agglomeration recently asked for a reconfiguration of the metropolitan infrastructures of mobility, explaining that ‘we must give back the metropolis its true place in the international exchanges’ (La Voix du Nord, 9 January 2008). Once again, Roubaix’s municipality was fully committed to this metropolitan volte-face. A shareholder of the new international financial centre of Lille city centre, the municipality has opportunely used the multiple international events recently hosted by Lille Métropole to brand its new image of a globally connected city.

As the case of the Lille agglomeration demonstrates, the creative destruction of the former scale of mobility of the industrial city gives birth to a new regulation of the mobilities in the post-Fordist age. More precisely, according to the metropolitan elites governing the post-industrial territories, two scales appear as crucial: the international scale and the city-region scale. This implies a deep reshaping of urban mobilities. The disruptions related to burgeoning globalization are deregulating the hierarchical system of the cities which were organized until recently on a pyramidal and hierarchical national model (Veltz, 2002). Within the developing ‘archipelago economy’ (Veltz, 1996), some cities appear to be coming out on top: these are the ‘global cities’ (Sassen, 1991), which manage to centralize capital, power and economic innovation. They constitute ‘the loci for new forms of the concentration of economic growth and the associated new forms of economic inequalities’ (Sassen, 1988: 168). The model of the ‘global city’ and the promise of an exponentially increased growth with the size of the city is a powerful engine for metropolization. The quest for increased transnational exchanges and mobilities through metropolization has been well demonstrated recently by urban research (Veltz, 1996; Brenner, 2004). Indeed, mega-cities appear increasingly as processes of flow: the technological networks and the infrastructures of mobility characterize the contemporary city (Merrifield, 1993; Harvey, 1996; Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000). Castells speaks about ‘symbolic cultural spaces of domination’, that is, ‘space of the elites … extremely specific as concerns architecture, with an abstract, standardized design, identical in Europe, in Hong Kong or the United States’ (Castells, quoted by Pfliger, 2006: 192–3).

Public Yet Non-civil Space

The translation in architectural terms of the increasing pressure for mobility is the emergence in global cities of ‘public yet non-civil spaces’ (Bauman, 2000) that are inhospitable urban places characterized by transportation and movement. In France, Paris was quick to adapt: Bauman gives the example of La Défense, which is a business district located in the west of Paris on a once industrial and working-class district and which was redeveloped by the French state in the 1960s to transform Paris from a national capital into a global city hosting international headquarters:

What strikes the visitor to La Défense is first and foremost the inhospitality of the place: everything within sight inspires awe yet discourages staying. Fantastically shaped buildings which encircle the huge and empty square are meant to be looked at, not in: wrapped from top to bottom in reflective glass, they seem to have neither windows nor entry doors opening towards the square; ingeniously, they manage to turn their backs to the square they face … These hermetically sealed fortresses/hermitages are in the place but not of it – and they prompt everyone lost in the flat vastness of the square to follow their example and feel likewise … There are no benches on which to rest, no trees beneath which to hide from the scorching sun and to cool off in the shade … Time and again, with the dull regularity of the Metro time-table, those others – ant-like files of pedestrians in a hurry – emerge from beneath the ground, stretch over the stony pavement separating the Metro exit from one of the shining monsters encircling (besieging) the square and fast disappear from view. And then the place is empty again – until the next train arrives. (Bauman, 2000: 96–7)

This kind of transformation of urban public space results from the increasing influence, within the global cities, of post-Fordist capitalism and of the groups directly emerging from globalization: the globalized elite, the group of transnational entrepreneurs, financiers and executives. They represent the ‘great’ in the ‘city by projects’ of which Boltanski and Chiapello draw the model, from a study of the texts on management of the 1990s. According to them:

In a planned city, access to greatness assumes the sacrifice of all that can stand in the way of availability for new projects. Greatness relinquishes the possibility of a lifelong project (a vocation, a job, a marriage, etc). It requires mobility. Nothing must hinder its movements. It is nomadic. … The necessity for nimbleness initially supposes giving up stability, setting down roots, attachment, persons or things. (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999: 183)

However, the requirements of neo-capitalism are not the only explanation. If one can follow Harvey (2005) when he describes neoliberalism as the ‘restoration of class power’ after the collapse of the Fordist compromise, such a project could not have been implemented without the support of other social groups. Indeed, as a result of the economic transition towards the ‘society of knowledge’ (Bell, 1973), the biggest metropolises also attract a ‘new middle-class’ (Ley, 1980), composed of young, urban, individualistic graduates. One of the most important characteristics of these individuals is precisely spatial mobility, be it as an element of a successful professional career or as an element of a successful holiday – increasingly remote and exotic travel, for example, is much appreciated by this new urban group (Heath and Potter, 2005). The values of this group are often interpreted as reconciling the values of capitalism and those resulting from the reactions against the rigidities of Fordism during the 1950s–1960s. That is why it has been argued that the new regime of accumulation has accommodated criticisms made by the countercultural movements of the old regime and, in so doing, has weakened these movements – especially the ‘artist critic’ ¹ of the old regime perceived as a source of disenchantment, inauthenticity and oppression (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999: 82–6, 282–4). Because of its strong presence in the sectors of information, communication and marketing, the new middle class living in the central areas plays the part of a cultural and political trend-setter (Guilluy, 2007). The resulting growing cultural divide about neoliberalism between the city centres and the rest of French territory was highlighted in 2005. On the occasion of the referendum on the European Union constitution when – and after a campaign dominated by the ‘yes’ faction – the main urban centres voted massively in favour of the constitution, the periurban and rural territories predominantly opposed it.

The new middle class, recently celebrated as the ‘creative class’ – thus being designated as a catalyst for local economic development (Florida, 2002) – has also increasingly influenced urban policies over the last 20 years (Boschken, 2003), particularly in terms of the aesthetic design of city centres (Ley, 1996). Thus, if ‘undoubtedly, in 1960 it was the worker of mass industry who was the implicit reference of urban designs’, from the 1980s ‘the expectations and practices (postulated rather than objectivized) specific to the “dynamic executives” of the high-tech companies were the model which guided the reflections and against which the actions of the developers were measured’ (Genestier, 1996: 176–7). As the literature on gentrification demonstrates, the new urban middle class is characterized by its frequent refusal of life in the suburbs, perceived as a space of confinement, and its preference for settling in the central areas of the metropolises (Bidou-Zachariasen, 2003). This social group is also characterized by its demand for regional facilities and international infrastructures of mobility (Rousseau, 2008).

The metropolitan elites are quick to adapt their city to their desires. They do so notably because of the recent spread of a ‘best practice’ according to which the consumption of this group would boost the local economies more than the increase of local production (Davezies, 2008). In addition, the growing withdrawal of the central state, the development of the autonomy and resources of the metropolitan government in its pursuit of local development, as well as the rise of inter-urban competition, explain why regional metropolises aspire in their turn to the attributes of world cities. This is why the infrastructures are intended to support mobility and ‘public yet non-civil spaces’ which, initially appearing in world cities, are adopted more and more by regional metropolises that are striving through operations of town planning close to marketing to show that they are also ‘playing in a higher division’, and especially the post-industrial territories which, like the Lille conurbation, are forced to rebuild their economic base destroyed by globalization. As Graham and Marvin (2001: 34) observe, ‘infrastructure networks are revealed, celebrated and constructed as iconic urban landmarks’. As a result, over the last two decades, the competition to ensure an urban niche in the market of urban tourism for the affluent has led the French local authorities to subsidize more and more – yet in a disguised way – the private airlines that operate on this market (Libération, 23 April 2003).

However, transnational mobility is not assumed to be available to everyone. The cost of mobility excludes the poorest inhabitants of the metropolis from the new opportunities allowed by the development of the new infrastructures of transportation. Moreover, the fear of new undesired mobilities (poor migrants, counterfeit goods, international gangs, drug traffickers …) has led to a generalized proliferation of walls, many of them strongly contested through symbolic subversion (Feigenbaum, 2009). The apparent contradiction of a ‘globalization [which] harbors fundamental tensions between opening and barricading’ (Brown, 2009: 7) is linked to the post-Fordist division of labour and the consequent social polarization operating on different scales, from the global North/South divide to the neighbourhoods of any city. This contradiction results in a reconfiguration of the ‘dromocracy’ whereby governing implies more and more the reproduction of social hierarchy and the perpetuation of the domination of the ‘dromomaniacs’ through an arbitrary regulation of differentiated access to mobility (Virilio, 1977). The French and British governments, for example, agree that illegal migrants from the Near East should be prevented from using the multiple possibilities of mobility to England, especially from Calais, offered by the trains, trucks and boats exclusively reserved for goods, professionals and tourists (Libération, 17 March 2009).

Beyond transnationalism, the second scale of mobility privileged by metropolitan policies, especially in the first decade of the new century, is the city-region. Here there is more variation, partly due to political shifts (as in the UK after the 2010 general election), and partly due to national traditions (Basten, 2011). In general, however, the aim is to facilitate the circulation of the workers inside the metropolitan territory in order to make the local labour market more flexible. This implies a reconfiguration of the regulation of mobility on post-industrial territory. Indeed, industrial capitalism sought to promote a specific regulation of routine mobilities on the urban scale by means of incentive measures (subsidized transport, patronage and workers’ housing estates), but also targeted repressive measures (such as repression of vagrancy and travelling cultures).

Like the technologies of mobility themselves (Urry, 2007), the incentive and repressive devices which shape urban mobilities are evolving; it is more difficult to identify them because of their diffusion and their dispersal. Extending the Foucaldian approach to adapt it to the contemporary economic climate, Deleuze forges the concept of ‘a society of control’, meaning that the disciplinary mechanisms formerly confined in a closed environment are now diffused in public spaces and can thus be applied to a large number of now mobile individuals: ‘the man of disciplines was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is a wave, put into orbit, on a continuous beam’ (Deleuze, 1990: 244). The post-industrial cities currently rebuilt as ‘mobility machines’ appear as a privileged ground for the study of such a society of control. Despite the power of the regularities and routines of everyday life, it is no longer so clear that these are the prime sites of social reproduction. In the French post-industrial cities, paternalism had long reinforced the routine mobilities characterizing the socio-spatial relations to the city, yet the neoliberal governmentality of mobility is the set of the urban and metropolitan policies implemented in order to institute a new socio-spatial relation to the city, implemented in the name of return to economic growth and characterized by a simultaneous acceleration and extension of the scale of the daily mobilities.

To come back to Roubaix, a city in which the collapse of the textile industry in the 1970s confined the former working class into several pauperized districts, ² and which now regards the politics of gentrification and the ‘re-imaging’ of the city centre for the new middle class as the main component of its redevelopment strategy (Rousseau, 2009), the urban mobilities inherited from the Fordist period are now perceived as an acute problem by the urban elites. For example, an executive of the city council’s department of town planning explained how much the local authority is currently preoccupied with the narrow scale of mobility of the pauperized population of former textile workers living in Trois Ponts – a modernist Corbusean housing estate built in the 1960s whose residents are now perceived as totally disconnected from the new scale of mobility promoted by the urban elites of the city-region:

One of the elements of modernity is to change the scale of action. Take the small Roubaisian district. Someone made a map, and there were 31 districts in Roubaix, it is very nice, but it is no scale of action, just a scale of confinement of people. It is necessary to explain to people because it is like that, that they will very probably not exercise their professional activity near their housing environment. They will work in Belgium, they will work in the metropolis or in the Bassin Minier, ³ or around Valenciennes. There is a problem of mobility. There are people who live in Trois Ponts, 1300 meters on foot from the city centre, and who say ‘I never go to Roubaix, all the services are in the city centre, there is nothing in Trois Ponts’. Who go with their granny to the football stadium of the district while there is a football stadium 600 meters away. They say that there is no sports facility in Trois Ponts, but there is one 600 meters away! So there is a logic which is a historic production, and somehow this slightly rustic character of Roubaix certainly allowed people to develop forms of sociability allowing them to resist the capitalist exploitation but which today makes it necessary to tell them: ‘it is not your living space’ … A young person today, he goes to the university to Villeneuve d’Ascq, he goes to Lille with his friends to party, he practises sport in Roubaix. If one looks at the occupation of space by people, one notices we are not one mono-space of proximity anymore. And the more one is integrated into the society, the more it’s true. So, people have to move on, it is necessary to gently explain to them. (interview, 2006)

To concretize their wish to ‘gently explain’ to the urban residents of the former working-class neighbourhoods to change their scale of mobility, the municipalities and the metropolitan government can adopt a wide range of incentives. The softest ones aim at encouraging mobility, for example through the provision of sport facilities in neighbouring cities or the organization of school trips. Another more subtle instrument of the urban government of mobility acts through unconscious imitation. From the mid-1990s, the ‘politique de la ville’ – the French state policy specifically targeting the impoverished urban districts – began to shift toward measures aiming at attracting the middle classes back into these neighbourhoods (Lelévrier, 2004). One of the objectives driving this policy reorientation was to make the traditional residents develop a network of ‘weak links’ with the new ones in order that they adopt the habitus of the middle classes, including a disposition for greater scales of mobility which is considered as a crucial condition to reduce unemployment and to increase economic growth (Donzelot, 2006).

Finally, the post-industrial city is rebuilt as one of the new hubs of the city-region. Vaulx-en-Velin and Vénissieux are two neighbouring cities located in the east of the Lyon agglomeration which exemplify this process. The population of both cities boomed during the Fordist period with the construction by the French state of several large housing estates built in order to house the workers, especially from the former colonies of North Africa. Indeed, Vaulx-en-Velin and Vénissieux were conceived by the state as a reservoir of labour for the numerous firms east of Lyon. This conception, which allowed the population of Vaulx-en-Velin to increase from 10,000 to 45,000 during the 1960s and 1970s and of Vénissieux to increase from 20,000 to 75,000 during the same period, was welcomed by both communist municipalities which were thus provided with a large number of (presumed) left-wing workers. However, things changed quickly after the crisis of the local industries and the first riots in the banlieues at the beginning of the 1980s in which both cities were at the vanguard. From a solution to the shortage of an unqualified workforce in the Fordist urban area to the east of Lyon, Vaulx-en-Velin and Vénissieux quickly appeared as a problem for the attractiveness of the post-Fordist city-region. With the closure of many of the neighbouring industrial plants, the routine mobilities of most inhabitants of the grands ensembles were restrained and the urban context appeared to many observers to have turned into a real trap. Although most of the postcolonial immigrants were closely connected to international networks, a perceived degree of low daily mobility was increasingly pointed to as one of the main problems faced by the French banlieues by some influential French researchers, such as the sociologist Donzelot – who here refers to Les Minguettes, a large housing estate of Vénissieux:

For proof of this confinement, we can take the international character of the spectacle of voluntary immobility which the deprived districts offer. Scholarly studies demonstrate the very low mobility of the inhabitants of these districts with regard to those of the middle classes. But one hardly needs quantified analyses to realize it. One cannot go there without feeling fairly quickly the strangeness of one’s own pace, a stride which appears suddenly too determined, in contrast with the attitude of the inhabitants who display no sense of haste. The immobility of some of them in the shared spaces, alone or in groups, without any obvious reason, is disconcerting. Their glance attracts attention and embarrasses, as if these spaces were theirs and not opened to all. Generally speaking, all the images associated with these districts bring to light this theme of immobility. First of all, that of the car joyrides begun in the district of Les Minguettes in 1981 and which were copied according to a well-established ritual in some suburbs of towns like Strasbourg. Stealing cars, driving them at top speed within the district, then setting them on fire, is this not a way of inverting the movement, of reducing it … to nothingness? (Donzelot, 2004: 21–2)

In Vaulx-en-Velin and Vénissieux, the response of the municipalities to the urban crisis has consequently been to turn their city from a magnet attracting and retaining the workers of the eastern part of the Lyon agglomeration into a hub for the whole city-region. Substantial transport infrastructure has thus been recently built by the metropolitan authorities (trolleys, subways, bus lanes) in Vénissieux and Vaulx-en-Velin, and the municipality of the latter city is especially proud of the new ‘multimodal hubs’ – which are sites designed to facilitate the connections between the multiple local, regional and international means of transportation. To the local decision-makers, these hubs are supposed to signal the belonging of Vaulx-en-Velin to the metropolis. According to the municipality, they have greatly facilitated the recent attraction of several regional headquarters in the city. Finally, in a total volte-face with the previous urbanization of both cities, mobility is also supposed to concern the residential routes of the inhabitants of the conurbation. Both municipalities are concerned with the attraction of property developers in order to develop a supply of housing for young members of the middle class, hoping to accelerate the turnover of the urban population. This preoccupation is also shared by the metropolitan government of Lyon, which tries to accelerate and to extend the physical and residential mobility of the workers to the scale of the city region.

In Vaulx-en-Velin and Vénissieux, the strategy aiming at rescaling the mobilities of the inhabitants appears as what Ong (2006) calls ‘neoliberalism as exception’ for both still-communist municipalities. It demonstrates to what extent the reshaping of urban mobility currently appears, even to urban governments which are still deeply concerned with the welfare of their electoral clientele, as a crucial element for urban prosperity. In doing this, both municipalities are making exceptions to their usual practices of governing in the hope of benefitting from strengthening the position of the Lyon agglomeration in the interurban competition. Inevitably, such a sudden evolution implies the emergence of political conflicts. In Vaulx-en-Velin, the growing discontent of some inhabitants against the new hubs and the increasing turnover of the local population has recently concretized with the creation of an association which aims at, among other things, protecting the public parks, setting up public benches, bringing down the speed limit and encouraging ‘soft moves’. Its name – ‘Vaulx-en-Velin Village’ – demonstrates the fear and the refusal of the metropolization of the city. It is interesting to note that the association, far from recruiting into the whole city, emanates from predominantly retired people of the local white lower-middle class whose practices of mobility have been mostly shaped under the Fordist era. ⁴

As Mirzoeff (2005: 16) emphasizes, the ‘modern anti-spectacle now dictates that there is nothing to see and that instead one must keep moving, keep circulating and keep consuming’. Besides these incentives, the authorities also use as part of their strategy several more repressive instruments which unequivocally stigmatize the immobile bodies likely to jam the city’s mobility networks. A law promulgated in 2003 thus creates new offences and new sanctions for soliciting, gathering in the entrance halls of buildings, squatting, and begging. The enemy is thus designated: they are the prostitutes, the beggars, the homeless people and the ‘young people of the suburbs’ (which is an euphemism used in France to name the marginalized ethnic minorities) – in short, the marginal misfits of contemporary France that the policies and the law have transferred from the category of ‘socially excluded’ to that of ‘delinquents’. At the time, this law was rightly denounced by many French intellectuals, associations and social movements as the expression of the neoliberal ‘revanchism’ (Smith, 1996) aimed at criminalizing misery and ‘punishing the poor’, to use Wacquant’s (2004) expression. It seemed to fit well with Dikeç’s interpretation of French urban policy as led by a ‘republican penal state’ (Dikeç, 2006). However, an element present in the law is neglected by these criticisms. A common physical, corporeal characteristic of these ‘new enemies’ grouped together in the same law is notable: the prostitutes, the young people of the deprived areas gathering in the entrance of their apartment block, the homeless or the beggars share a similar narrow scale of mobility which the new metropolitan rhythm is designed to replace.

In the same way, most of the urban researchers who wonder about defensive urbanism and repressive architecture consider that the main targets of these recent global urban transformations are the underprivileged social groups. The focusing of critical research on the phenomenon of the ‘gated communities’ (e.g. Flusty, 1994; Low, 2003), on the privatization of public space (e.g. Mitchell, 2003; Low and Smith, 2006) and on the development of the urban electronic surveillance often interpreted in terms of militarization of space and privatization of security tinged with paranoia against the ‘new dangerous classes’ (e.g. Davis, 1990; Ellin, 1996) should not prevent us from noticing how the design of the city’s public space more and more openly declares war on a larger group: those who now appear ill-adapted to the acceleration of mobilities in the post-industrial metropolis. Thus, the disappearance of public benches and the proliferation of dissuasive urban furniture in places where it was formerly possible to sit down is rarely studied, or when it is, only through the prism of the war against the poorest, and in particular the homeless (e.g. Gardella and Le Méner, 2005; Soutrenon, 2001). The point is not to discuss this interpretation, but to shift the focus: behind the war against beggars and the homeless, there is also the war against those who fail to use new public space properly. This is a significant contest which will in part determine the outcome for the very idea of the post-industrial metropolis. It is a question of preventing the body from remaining immobile in the ‘spaces of flows’ (Castells, 1989). At stake is the rescaling of old urban mobilities at city-region and transnational scales which will lead to successful post-industrial metropoles.

Conclusion: Capitalism and Democracy in Tension

The regulation of urban mobilities has successively been the subject of several strategies aimed at accelerating them or, on the contrary, of several tactics aimed at restraining them. In the former industrial cities, one may identify a long process of widening of the scale of the mobilities as the pressure of the capitalist time and space compression was reinforcing. After the collapse of French industry, cities which had been built upon production have followed the same path as the French capital. Freed from powerful local industrialists, the urban governments have given up the old tactic aimed at restricting mobilities in favour of a strategy aiming at maximizing urban flows. Such a strategy can be defined as ‘neoliberalism as exception’ (Ong, 2006), since even to urban governments which are still deeply concerned with the welfare of the working class, the reshaping of urban mobility appears as a crucial element for urban prosperity. The implementation of this new strategy is facilitated by the many opportunities the contemporary city offers of instituting this ‘society of control’ which Deleuze speaks about. Homeless people, prostitutes, beggars, and ‘young people from the suburbs’ standing in front of their buildings: all these groups are certainly part of the ‘excluded’ of contemporary France. But their social exclusion, their uselessness for capitalism, makes them ‘overnumbered’ (Castel, 1995), ‘human waste’ (Bauman, 2007), and cultural rejects at a time of hegemonic mobility. All share the same threatening corporeal immobility in the middle of an urban public space dominantly considered, in the era of globalized capitalism, as a ‘space of perpetual flow’. The ‘Schumpeterian’ state (Jessop, 1999) shows another facet here: among the mechanisms gradually substituting ‘workfare’ for ‘welfare’ (Peck, 2001; Jessop, 2002), the setting in motion of urban bodies should not be forgotten.

The recent spread of the conception of the city as a mobility machine asks important questions about capitalism and democracy in the post-industrial city. Such a model paves the way for the advent of an uneven city, and even a dual city. To convince oneself, it is enough to observe the residential and commercial ‘upscaling’ of most of the centres of the French cities during the last two decades (Rousseau, 2012): the gentrification of city centres populated by the ‘winners’ is explained above all by their localization at the centre of the urban flows, and thus their promise of an accelerated and diversified access to employment, consumption and leisure. For the ‘losers’, on the other hand, led by property bubbles to exile themselves further and further, mobility appears more and more clearly as suffering and constraint (Enaux et al., 2011). Moreover, we need to remind ourselves that since the Athenian agora – the marketplace and the site of deliberation and participation in collective decision-making – the city has been strictly bound to the smooth functioning of democracy. For that purpose, it must be conceived so as to favour exchange, sharing, meeting. From this point of view, its transformation into a space of perpetual flows complicates very concretely the practices of sociability, in particular of the working class, and thus jeopardizes the universal consideration of the interests which guarantee a virtuous democracy. It is therefore no surprise to note that the contesting of the metropolis as site of permanent movement has appeared there from the beginning. In France, one should however note that the various tactics recently implemented in neighbouring countries to slow down the neoliberal city – which range from the liberationist ‘Reclaim the Street’ movement inspired by the anarchist ‘temporary autonomous zones’ (Bey, 1991) to, in a more institutional way, the network of ‘slow cities’ (Città Slow ⁵ ) – have not yet been very successful.