A Tale of Two Cities: Urbanism and Violence at the Time of the 2005 French Riots

The paper looks at a specific type of collective action - anti-state violent rioting in neighborhoods of advanced urban marginality - and investigates the role of the urban environment in shaping the grievances expressed and mobilization/counter-mobilization processes observed during a riotous episode. In particular, I study large social housing estates as a propitious urban environment for the eruption and sustainance of anti-state violence. I identify three separate mechanisms (stigma amplification and inversion, failure of state intervention in the form of everyday administration and policing during an emergency, mobilizational opportunities for network-building of local youth) that are distinct from standard explanations of rioting based on socioeconomic and ethnic grievances. I test the explanation using a controlled case study of two neighboring suburbs in the North of Paris, with similar socioeconomic and demographic characteristics but different violent outcomes in the 2005 wave of "banlieues" riots. The paper traces the source of local variation to the existence of large, concentrated social housing estates in one but not the other. In making this argument and I test the proposed mechanisms of a "grand ensemble" (social housing estate) effect using evidence from local municipal archives, interviews with local elites, official reports from police departments and local authorities and an analysis of local newspapers.