6 - Community development, empowerment and youth participation in social-housing neighbourhoods in France

Summary

‘A young man from the neighbourhood, no matter how he is a leader, if you put him in the street all alone, he is nothing. Alone, he no longer has any power. His power comes from the neighbourhood.’ (A young boy from the neighbourhood)

This chapter investigates the gap between this young man's sense of how his power derives from the neighbourhood of Sanitas and the practices of ‘empowerment’ associated with established community development projects in that same neighbourhood. In France, the language of empowerment, associated elsewhere with community development, is more usually associated with ‘animation’ and ‘popular education’. As for community development workers elsewhere, the theoretical foundations laid in the work of Paulo Freire are evident in the histories of Community Associations in the neighbourhood of Sanitas, but this does not appear to create an openness to the young people of the district: a long-standing issue for community development practice in both France and elsewhere. Laclau and Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (2009) claim that deliberative democracy with the will to build consensus oppresses different viewpoints especially with regard to race, class, gender and, we can add, generational perspectives. According to Laclau and Mouffe, it is only with radical democratic methods that oppressive power relations can be made visible, renegotiated and altered.

Starting from this idea, when we talk about radical democracy, we are talking about a praxis coming from the roots of democracy itself; in other words, a praxis far from a set of procedures but rather an infinite process of deconstruction/reconstruction of the substance, forms and limits of collective existence: a dynamic irreducible to any institutional state and coming clearly from grassroots initiatives. Laclau and Mouffe (2009: 269) suggest that if we want to return the original signification to the term ‘democracy’ in the current neoliberal age, we should accept it ‘as a new matrix of the social imagination and as a fundamental nodal point in the construction of politics’. In addition, this should be done in plural ways including all individuals with all their rights as well as all struggles with their claims.

This plurality is particularly important: with its democratic logic of the generalisation of equivalence it includes all social and cultural categories in the realisation of a collective participation including youth and children.