Un processus de marginalisation en zone urbaine

Abstract

Geneva, prosperous Swiss city with an international vocation, has in the last ten years been confronted with various social problems which had little affected it up to that point. This paper deals with one of the questions that lately appeared, the process of marginalization in urban zones.

The analysis adopted confronts urban sociology and educational sciences, in particular the contribution of the former to the study of the critical effects of metropolization (the functional specialization and social differentiation of urban spaces) together with the observations of the latter concerning the effects of prolonged schooling (massification and individualization).

These perspectives are first illustrated by the example of Genevan schools of the secondary I level. It appears that their social composition is at once associated with their territorial location and, to a more or less important degree, a cause of learning difficulties. We then concentrate specifically on the observation of the transformation of a district on the periphery of the city, which in the last ten years changed from a socially mixed, residential area for happy people, to one with the highest concentration of low income households in the canton. We are more particularly interested in the mechanisms and the combination of economic, political and social factors which led to this evolution, and in the incidences of this change on the school and its principal actors (teaching, parents, pupils and local authorities).

The study reveals how a process of marginalization in an urban zone can arise and develop. It stresses the interrelationships between the problems of spatial segregation, social differentiation and educational inequalities. It suggests that it is necessary to pay much more attention to the effects on schools of the transformation of their social context