Thomas Aguillera on slums in Madrid and Paris
▻http://www.sciencespo.fr/en/news/news/alternative-ways-living-city-are-needed-bring-cities-life-1/2542
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So why are there still so many squats and slums? Are public authorities incapable of managing these spaces or populations?
Un-governability is constructed by public authorities who want to justify their inaction in order to justify states of emergency. One of my main findings was that public authorities spend much more time seeking to avoid issues and blaming other levels of government than on solving problems. I call this agenda of collective and strategic denial “public inaction”. It explains, for example, why the French state has ignored slums since the 1990s, and why Madrid’s biggest slum (Cañada Real Galiana) has been tolerated and left in the shadows in order to facilitate the eviction of other slums in the city centre.
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What are the outputs and the outcomes of these policies?
I showed that policies are always selective: they create beneficiaries who are integrated into projects, and losers who are evicted to the margins of metropolises and public services. Policy instruments always impose major constraints on beneficiaries, but the beneficiaries are able to resist and deviate the instruments. That is why policies never produce the expected effects.
My study yielded two additional findings. First, policies create as many forms of illegality and precariousness as they seek to resolve. Second, targeted groups are able to resist and to change policies under certain conditions, and most effectively when they combine disruptive modes of collective action (illegal squatting, protests, etc.) with conventional modes of action (alliance with bureaucrats and the media). Finally, I also drew a more general conclusion about the effects of social movements on public policies: the more social movements are fragmented, the greater their power to change policies.