Negative Neighbourhood Reputation and Place Attachment by Kirkness Paul. Tijé-Dra Andreas. & Andreas Tijé-Dra

Author:Kirkness, Paul.,Tijé-Dra, Andreas. & Andreas Tijé-Dra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

p.127

In her lyrics, Keny Arkana starts by excluding possible positive interpretation of downtown development of La Joliette7 with the use of the strong marker ‘certainly not’ when stating that this is not what the residents of the area would have wanted. By using the collective ‘we’ when she discusses the rejection for these policies, Arkana associates herself to the frustration and she then goes on to reject the propositions that these redevelopments have led to (even partial) improvements to the lived experiences of local inhabitants. For long-term residents, La Joliette has not changed for the better and what has been done to date has not been in the interest of the local collective identity (‘we’, ‘our’), which she claims to represent. The large-scale evictions that she implies (she states that there have been ‘hundreds of’ these) have also had strong impacts on the social structure and daily life of the area, but they have also demonstrated the strong emotional bonds to the city. As a large percentage of Marseille’s downtown population is of North African descent and has been resettled elsewhere today, this identity aspect of ‘her’ (in the song, appearing as the collective ‘our’) Marseille seems to have disappeared. The polyphonic ‘seems like’ in combination with this disappearance demonstrates Arkana’s weakening sense of hope and the uncertainty that she feels with regards to the possible undoing of what has already been undertaken for the sake of city redevelopment.

The rapper furthers her point of view by explicitly critiquing property-led city development, which she describes as being to the disadvantage of current residents. In fact, the economic interests of non-residents bring about a diminished (or ‘demolished’) quality of life to those who would otherwise have been happy enough to stay put. This is clear when one considers the example of one of Marseille’s shopping streets, the Rue de la République and its Haussmannian buildings that in part belonged to la Joliette. There, demolition and displacement has led to the withdrawal of social and economic life, as investors followed different strategies intended to close the rent gap and to valorise former social housing and traditional shops, selling them to developers. In many cases, social housing operators ended up buying up the very stock of housing that had been redeveloped by the developers when these were unable to sell it. As a result, social life is now heavily fragmented: social and physical space is marked by a strange mosaic of vacant and degraded homes, as well as (often empty) luxury apartments and renewed social housing units (Un Centre Ville Pour Tous, 2015).

This is also why the streets that she vocally claims as ‘ours’ have changed for the worst in the present. In a drastic comparison, Keny Arkana compares the segregation stemming from these processes of urban capitalism to a certain kind of urban ‘Apartheid’, pointing to a profound social fractures. In the same context she tackles hegemonic representations of the quartiers populaires, re-labelling them as ‘zones’ in which a sense of community has clearly existed according to her (unlike the term zone would otherwise suggest).

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