Shaping communities through culture. The working-class neighborhood policies in France and Germany

Since the 1970s, many European countries have developed social policies targeting urban neighbourhoods where marginalized populations are concentrated. In a context of neo-liberalization and managerialization of public policies, this territorialization of the social issue takes the form of measures and mechanisms aimed at responsibilizing inhabitants and activating their social and civic participation in the spheres of the job market, school, neighborhood life or solidarity. This is notably the case of the Politique de la ville in France and the Quartiersmanagement implemented within the framework of the Soziale Stadt program in Germany. Based on a comparative ethnographic investigation, this paper focuses on the ways in which these policies and the actors involved in them seek to change the behaviors and cultural references of the public they target and to integrate them into a unified neighborhood community through certain intermediation practices. The ethnographic method implemented, combining observations, interviews and documentary analysis, allows us to study social and cultural intermediation in the making and thus from the point of view of its cultural consequences. It shows in fact how the inhabitant publics largely resist the prescriptions to participation and activation which are addressed to them. Finally, it leads us to focus on the dynamics of incitement and constraint through which the categories of public action are above all appropriated and internalized by the intermediary actors in charge of relaying them to the inhabitants, such as social and associative workers.