Demolition of social housing building is considered today, as an official and justified action process in 1/ patrimonial management of an obsolete public housing stock, 2/ urban management of working class neightborhoods. Responding to demolition request, firstly ponctual and localized, then more and more numerous and diversified, the state government will resist until 1988 to this inthinkable demolition process, and put forward the " repairing referential " of a generalized rehabilitation policy to the entire social housing stock. The rising development of local urban policies will lead the state government to a first administrative legitimacy of demolition in 1996 in the " urban project process ". The use will be common in 2001, in the name of urban renewal and of limits recognition of the urban policy to reduce the social and spatial segregation phenomena versus " egalitarian city " republican idealism. The long terme resistance of the french state government to transfer to the local authority the arbitration of using demolition for a social vocation public patrimony is analyzed, here, with the help of political science tools, and more particulary these ones of public policy analysis of non-decision making approach. These ones unable us to reveal the internal contradiction of concrete action system composed of the three interdependant partners of the social housing policy implementation : state government, local government and public housing authorities. Thought as between " scenes and screens ", betweem resistance and retreat facing local reality, the urban design project is considered here as a contingent product of actors strategies with divergent interests, about which the demolition thesis allows us to study the production process.
Public housing demolition : city planning between " scenes and screens"