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ABSTRACT Banlieues 89 was a design-led initiative in French urban policy in France in the 1980s. The initiative or 'movement', which was multidisciplinary in its approach, challenged existing preconceptions and professional practice with regard to inner and outer suburban areas. In its focus on combating social exclusion, the initiative presaged current preoccupations with social difference, marginality and urban design quality. This paper outlines critically the history of the Banlieues 89 movement and suggests that its contribution to urban design discourse has a contemporary significance.
Introduction
Within the heart of the first grand-projet in Paris, in the Centre George Pompidou, there exists an open access public library. The reader is offered a number of services, of which the most readily accessible, the most exciting, is a touch-screen interactive display unit which invites the observer, among other things, to read ready-prepared dossiers on current items of interest. The death of President Mitterrand provides the topic for one such dossier.
Mitterand's successes and failures are picked over by correspondents in France's most respected newspapers and journals. Due attention is paid to his cultural activities; the grands travaux are pronounced truly at an end by the left-wing paper Liberation (Vincendon, 1995). It is only the urbanist Paul Chemetov who mentions the other experiment of the Mitterrand years, the 'episode' of Banlieues 89.
In contrast to the bravura of the Brands-travaux (Le Secretariat d'Etat, 1989), the Banlieues 89 programme provided an example of a design-led attempt to address the questions of social and physical marginality. Its focus was the 'fringe' of urban areas, derelict industrial sites and forgotten housing estatesthe areas 'in between'. The discourse of the programme addressed the problems of social marginality and exclusion, excoriating administrative complacency and political indifference.
The movement was multidisciplinary and challenged established methods of implementation. Interestingly, it presaged the type of approach which has been pursued in the City Challenge and Single Regeneration Budget projects in the UK, but without the economic imperatives. The programme also took seriously what would, in an English or North American context, be termed the problems of the 'inner city' in an urban design sense and attempted to find solutions. In doing so, the question of the cultural ambience of the suburbs and of peripheral centres was...