Urban struggles that marked Toulouse
“My city is the most beautiful park, its life full of attraction, your city will be this park if that is your ambition. Your city will be this park if you make the decision to do so” sang the Fabulous in the mid-90s [1]. They were then the singers of the “neighborhood meals”. The conviviality and the “initiative” of each one was then the alpha and the omega of a successful urban life. A consensual facade which put the veil on a period when urban struggles were flourishing in Toulouse carried out by the Committee for the Study and Defense of the Northern Neighborhoods, the Association for the Defense against the Southern Bypass Highway, the Committee for the Defense of the Banks of the Garonne and the city centre, the Lalande Defense Committee, the Association for the Defense of Récébédou tenants, the Fontaine Lestang study group and the Canal Banks Safeguard Committee. These are some of the 23 groups that took part in the Union of Neighborhood Committees (UCQ) in February 1982. A period when the struggles initiated during the previous decade were still alive. In the documentary “The shape of a city, alas”, a participant testifies: “At the time, the neighborhood committees were formed on the basis of struggles. We didn’t get together because we were from the neighborhood, to have a meal. But because there was such a project, then two or three people formed a committee because they did not agree to there being a ring road, for example. That’s why we were able to form the Union of Neighborhood Committees at the time because it was people who were fighting. »
It was at the end of the 1960s that a few neighborhood committees, and in particular that of the northern neighborhoods, tried to join forces. During a “study seminar” in 1971, the UCQ wrote: “Toulousans, more numerous than one might think, are interested in the development of their city and want to contribute to the better living of the whole townspeople. They feel permanently responsible for the future of their neighborhood. Associations for the study and defense of the general interest that have existed in Toulouse for several years. A number of them have banded together – since May 8, 1970.” [2] This union seems to slip away for a while and regain strength in the middle of the decade. In February 1977, it already claims 12 member committees and associations and has listed no less than 25 urban struggles since 1971, ranging from the defense of housing to transport, through the fight against motorway routes and the high cost of living – a “collective appropriation of the Mammoth hypermarket, a place at Christmas in 1976. The leitmotif of the time: “Fighting for the Toulouse we want”. If this union endorses the “defense of the living environment”, it is not quite a question of conviviality and animation. It is indeed economic, social and political struggles in question.
Popular control of living conditions
This is claimed by an article published in the 1980s under the title “Vivre et fight à Toulouse”: “The economic crisis is doubly paid for by the workers, once by the compression of their wages, a second by the increase rents and rental charges. Those who cannot pay are prosecuted, expelled. But at Mirail-Reynerie, the inhabitants were able, thanks to the charges strike, to obtain a reduction in these charges and to denounce the thefts of the promoters. In Empalot, through their mobilization, the inhabitants thwarted the eviction attempts. And as early as 1965, the residents of Rangueil demonstrated that only struggle can turn back rogue promoters. And to conclude: “Living differently is about the most exploited and oppressed – workers, immigrant women, young and old – radically transforming their conditions. Then this society elaborated another city. Changing the city, and therefore Toulouse, means first of all changing society. » [3]
All the people gathered across the city in different committees and associations perhaps did not share this radicalism, but at the very least this reflection had the right of citizenship and was in phase with the minimum agreement expressed in the platform of the UCQ in 1977. This called for “planning controlled by the inhabitants; a right to collective facilities for all neighborhoods without discrimination; a refusal of motorways in the middle of the urban fabric; priority to frequent, fast, non-polluting, free public transport; the right to housing throughout the city without segregation” [4].
The struggles that take place in the neighborhoods of Toulouse are often very long and very specific, it is difficult to qualify the outcome in a clear-cut way. It took no less than ten years for the Comité de Défense des Berges de la Garonne, between 1974 and 1984, to prevent a motorway from passing over them and thus preserve the town centre, but access to the river was lost at Empalot. The inhabitants of Rangueil did not prevent the ring road from passing, but brought it in for a whole section. This is not the case for the sectors of La Faourette, Bagatelle and Reynerie. Here, no great victories, as in the context of struggles at work, but essential adjustments even if they sometimes seem to allow the continuity of the disaster.
What the disillusioned balance sheet of a participant in the fight illustrates well: “I had the impression that we made a real estate gift on the quay of the Garonne because we made a significant real estate revaluation. And that’s not quite what I wanted. This clearly shows the limits of the ecological fight. For me today, if there is not an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian dimension… then we serve the soup to capitalism. » [5]. This is the trap of defending the “living environment”: once preserved, it becomes an element of land value appreciation and can promote segregation. Urban issues are complex, difficult to see clearly: “If it hadn’t been for the mobilization of neighborhood associations, sometimes with other associations… Many disasters would have occurred. » [6]. So what happened to make this fighting spirit seem distant today?
Take part in the development
At the center of the demands of the urban struggles, there was information and participation. For the UCQ, they were the condition of this popular control, against “the urbanism of contempt, social control and prestige” [7]. A tool had been set up in 1977 by the UCQ: the Atelier Populaire d’Urbanisme or APU, which would in particular take up the land use plan (POS). Members were alerted and invited to participate in work meetings from January 1977 in these terms: “The POS is going to leave. That is to say a plan that will decide the urban life of all Toulousians, and this without appeal. A plan that offers the best share to promoters (le Refuge, Jaurès, Marengo); a plan that endorses the work carried out in defiance of the demands of the associations (Rocade Sud); a plan which, under the pretext of good functioning, facilitates evictions, demolitions, renovations for the benefit of a wealthy minority (Saint Georges); a plan that pushes working people further and further away from the center to reserve it for this minority. Over several years, information evenings, training on urban issues and counter-proposals will be carried out.
But it is also perhaps here that a fatal contradiction arises between mobilizations and the complexity of the cases: town planning and the law are two complex languages which mask the real balance of power favoring the remote settlement of social struggles and reinforcing existing institutions. A former president of the UCQ testified: “We talk about participatory democracy… There’s even a law on that, but what have we lost since the 80s! We used to go to the administrative court as if joking before. Now, we are being fined, lawyer fees in reality but it’s the same, it can go very high, there’s no limit. I’ve seen three thousand euros on business. We lost, lost… but we lost like that little by little…” [8] The legal aspect takes on such importance in certain struggles that the most involved activists take on increasingly complex cases.
Democracy and urban power
Since the 1980s, a certain number of directives and laws have both made the development of urban plans more complex, which are now accompanied by an army of experts and perfected “participation”. There are countless information and consultation meetings, leaflets and public displays. We have gone from total secrecy to a kind of “urban factory” pornography [9]. For example, the Local Urbanism Plan of Toulouse (heir to the POS) has been the subject of dozens of public meetings, involving the inhabitants district by district. Today there is an internet platform of the municipality which collects the opinions of the inhabitants. However, it would be daring to say that popular power is being built on the rise in rents, the quality of housing and the price of land, and even on the nature of facilities and long-term urban policies. On the contrary, promoters have free rein and destructive mega-projects are going well. Worse, projects like Toulouse Euro Sud-Ouest, which destroyed part of the suburbs of the station in defiance of the inhabitants, have been accompanied for years by a cartel of associations and neighborhood committees, thus giving it an aura of important legitimacy. And at La Reynerie or Negreneys, urban transformations are still just as violent. Fifty years after the destruction of the St Georges district, nothing seems to have really changed [10]. And, if the PLU has been canceled by a court decision following complaints from individuals and associations or if the 150 meters of contempt of the Occitanie tower are frozen due to a legal dispute, the deep economic issues , social and political are left out. In the end, this only involves a few associative specialists on the subject. The rest of the inhabitants undergo the transformations of their environment. However, we feel day by day that it is where we live that the social inequalities of an iniquitous and destructive economic system are played out and realized. Changing the city and changing society therefore always remain intimately linked.