Resisting the Demolition: The Fight to Save Social Housing in Roubaix’s Alma-Gare District

The site, which also provides for 390 rehabilitations, 90 constructions and various social and public facilities, would drive out a thousand of the current inhabitants.

The objective of the project, estimated at 133 million euros, is to “de-densify” the Alma-gare, which suffers from a “very degraded” social park, “social” problems, “insecurity and of deal”, according to the impact study. And to “diversify” the habitat, to promote “mixing”.

– “Iconic” counter-project –

“It’s chasing the poor,” accuses Eric Mouveaux, a 58-year-old social worker. Located between a new eco-district, a university campus and a start-up incubator, “Alma-gare does the job”, ironically this member of the collective. He denounces a “simulacrum of consultation”, with plans “already recorded”.

However, resulting from an “emblematic” urban struggle in the 1970s/1980s, Alma is “a reference” in terms of urban planning, citizen participation and city policy, underlines Julien Talpin, researcher in political science at CNRS.

At the time, faced with the decline of textiles, Roubaix already wanted to demolish this district made up of courtyards, these workers’ houses grouped around a courtyard, deemed unhealthy.

To save their “traditional sociability”, the residents organize themselves. Supported, within a “popular workshop of town planning” by architects and town planners, they impose a counter-project: small buildings connected by places and passageways, hailed by several international prizes.

But crisis and unemployment catch up with the island, while the town hall, moved to the right, withdraws subsidies, and concentrates there, with the donors, the most precarious, says Mr. Talpin.

At the beginning of 2000, corridors and gardens considered “criminogenic” because invested by the deal, are largely walled up, bristling with railings and now strewn with garbage.

We “drank tea, played football”, regrets the collective, which denounces sabotage, and “total abandonment” of donors, especially “from the NPRU”. This winter, many families went months without hot water.

– “Moratorium” –

One of the main donors, Lille Métropole Habitat, recognizes “old dysfunctions”, and “management problems” linked in particular to insecurity, but ensures that it invests “massively”. According to him, it is the acceleration of the NPRU that will “improve” the lives of the inhabitants.

The Roubais municipal opposition, like the president of the town planners of Hauts-de-France Myriam Cau, calls on the contrary for a “moratorium”, to preserve a “collective intangible heritage”.

The mobilized inhabitants want to replay history with a counter-project, which would safeguard their “bonds of solidarity” and “revive” the passageways and common spaces.

A first workshop will be organized in May with urban planners and architects, including Marcellino Saab, associate director of Ausia, one of the agencies involved in the previous project. He intends to oppose the demolitions in court, and judges these buildings “perfectly rehabilitable”.

The opponents also want to “quantify the carbon and human balance” of the demolitions, while, according to them, 50,000 social housing units are missing in the MEL.

But for the DVD mayor Guillaume Delbar, “the signed, contractual framework” is “not negotiable”. “Developed for six years with study firms, concerted” since 2017, the redevelopment is “one of the least demolishers” in France and collects a broad “consensus”, he assures.

“Only 7%” of households want to “stay absolutely”, when many others “ask to leave”, he insists.

According to the National Agency for Urban Renewal, which finances 453 projects in France, changes are still possible, if communities so request. But the arbitrations must not delay any longer to maintain “the overall balance of the calendar”.