Participation and housing policies: a century-old phenomenon Marie-Hélène Bacqué and Claire Carriou The recent renewed interest in participatory housing experiments is, in fact, linked to a much longer history that can be traced back to the late 19 th century, when the first public policies in France to encourage the construction of low-cost housing were introduced. Metropolitics looks at how this multifaceted history has laid the foundations for today’s projects. In France, since the late 1980s and the last realisations in a set of participatory housing projects, enthusiasm for participatory experiments in the field of housing seemed to have waned. What has become of the ideas born of the events of 1968? Operations such as the Petit Séminaire estate in Marseille and the Alma-Gare neighbourhood in Roubaix (near Lille), once the subject of much discussion and comment, and now in the process of a new rehabilitation, increasingly tended to be filed away among the curiosities of French urban-planning history, while the movement for self- managed cohousing entered a phase of decline. And yet, after several years’ or even decades’ absence, the issue of resident participation in the housing sector seems to have made a comeback on the public and political stage. It has been adopted by different players, ranging from residents’ groups and independent networks developing forms of “alternative” housing – cohousing, cooperatives, self-managed housing, eco-housing – to institutional stakeholders. A number of local authorities (such as Lyon, Nanterre (to the west of Paris) and Montreuil (to the east of Paris), to name but three) have also shown a keen interest in these experiments. Some social landlords are also finally beginning to get to grips with the idea, seeing it as an opportunity for a possible renaissance of social-housing cooperatives – the successors of the institutional cooperative movement that has been dying a slow death since the early 1970s, after a law limiting its remit came into force in 1971 (Maury 2009; Territoires 2010). The search for alternative proposals In response to new tensions in the field of housing, institutional and political leaders and citizens alike are now looking for alternatives to conventional housing production practices. The two key groups – private developers and social landlords – that have traditionally structured the housing sector since the post-war boom in France 1 are today struggling to meet demand in a context characterised by a reorganisation of the way central government operates and a weakening of social protection. Consequently, a new housing crisis is emerging for the working classes and certain parts of the middle classes as a result to rising property prices in the private sector. As for the social sector, it is in the midst of a heated debate on the role that social housing should play. It is thus caught between two imperatives – housing for the poorest on the one hand, and social diversity on the other – at a time when public funds are being cut significantly. Interest in the theme of participation, buoyed by various issues – managerial, social and political – has, moreover, grown significantly to the point of being both an essential element of public policy and a key demand of 1 Known in French as “les Trente Glorieuses”, the “30 glorious years” between 1945 and 1975. 1