Abstract (EN)

The institutionalization of urban policy has some original features. It is highly voluntary, with a heavy symbolic content. Most of its promoters are higher civil servants associated with the public housing movement rather than elected officials and party militants. In spite of its global ambitions, it has given birth to a fragile central goal-pursuing administration, not easy to apprehend for its ministerial partners. It has survived political alternations thanks to the creation of very flexible deconcentrated institutional devices, which make it possible to exorcise by affirmative action of French cities' fear of ghettoization.