Racism and neoliberalism in Marseille

Blog post by Amir Aziz, University of California, Berkeley
 
Situated in the scenic port area, the downtown neighbourhood Noailles is frequently touted as the heart of multicultural diversity in the French Mediterranean city of Marseille. Since the 1990s, Noailles has been subjected to waves of urban renewal programmes, such as the Euroméditerranée project, that sought to revitalize Marseille’s downtown by building new offices, hotels and tourist amenities. This construction of expensive projects has threatened to drive out longtime Noailles residents and shopowners, many of whom are of Muslim and northern/western African origin.

In October 2018, locals protested the decision to tear down Place Jean-Jaurès, a public square affectionately called La Plaine (‘The Plains’) that hosted free local activities and markets. The city deployed riot police to quell protests and guard the construction zone, erecting a costly 2.5-metre concrete wall to prohibit access. Yet, commercial redevelopment has not led to concrete living improvements for locals.

​On November 5, 2018, two buildings on Rue d’Aubagne collapsed, killing eight people. Locals blamed it on systemic neglect of the city’s poorest inhabitants, arguing that the tragedy shed light on other derelict buildings across Marseille’s old city centre where residents remain entrapped in unsafe living conditions.

My Identities article, ‘Marseille in uproar: secularism, multiculturalism, and urban degradation in the city of immigrants’, highlights a paradox underlining Marseille’s redevelopment: as renewal projects increasingly drive out long-time residents from Noailles, city officials continue to mine them, as emblematic figures of Marseille’s famed multicultural diversity, for extractive economic and cultural capital to uphold its cosmopolitan image.

I examine how universalist concepts like ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘co-existence’ and ‘social mixing’ are strategically used by officials to symbolically celebrate Marseille’s diverse multicultural communities in service of commercialized ventures, yet those same communities are stigmatized as ‘foreigners’ and ‘invaders’ in political rhetoric and policy. Marseille’s multiculturalism is appraised as a state-sanctioned project insofar as its diversity is depoliticized as a matter of commercialization, sidestepping problems of social inequality faced by minorities.

In January 2018, I attended a public forum at the local Mazenod Theatre on 88 Rue d’Aubagne, just metres away from what would later that year become the rubble of 63-65 Rue d’Aubagne. During the forum, officials announced new projects to pedestrianize downtown, and build bicycle paths and upscale hotels. When residents enquired on plans to protect tenants from unsafe buildings and negligent slumlords, officials offered vague responses, blaming the issues on private proprietors. When asked why Marché des Capucins, a local market and economic lifeline for small vendors, was closed and its trees uprooted, an official replied, ‘You can’t make omelettes without cracking a few eggs’.

A shopkeeper, Hakim, remarked to me that it was more a hasty information dump than a genuine mutual dialogue, adding, ‘Even if they improve things, they will ensure we are not here to enjoy it. We are only Africans, Arabs, foreigners to them’. Hakim’s statement marks a reality many residents are familiar with: for all the talk of Noailles as Marseille’s cultural heart, actual public policy betrays how such sensibilities remain submerged in racialized tropes of the Arab, Muslim and African ‘Other’ that must be removed to make way for urban renewal. Marseille’s mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin, portrays Marseille’s downtown as overrun by masses of ‘foreigners’, despite most residents being French citizens or French-born.

Whose ‘renewal’ is exactly at stake here? Whose spaces and livelihoods were transformed to make Marseille’s revival possible? Who has access to live, work or travel in newly-revitalized city spaces? While proponents praised how Marseille’s decaying waterfront became a modernized, lively public space, enhancing its cultural capital and livability, such cosmetic changes came with little improvement to locals’ living conditions.

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Image credit: Amir Aziz, June 2021.

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Read the Identities article:
Aziz, Amir. (2024). Marseille in uproar: secularism, multiculturalism, and urban degradation in the city of immigrants. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2444106.   OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities:

The most cosmopolitan European city: situating narratives and practices of cultural and social relations in Marseille
 
Boundaries of Frenchness: cultural citizenship and France’s middle-class North African second-generation
 
Looking through two lenses: reflections on transnational and translocal dimensions in Marseille-based popular music relating to the Comoros  
​OPEN ACCESS