The hidden side of metropolization. Governing squats and slums in ...

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Legend: Articles about squats; Articles about Jeudi Noir; Opening of a squat by Jeudi Noir
Figure 7 - Evolution (per month) of newspaper articles on squats and Jeudi Noir squats (2006-2011) / Press review
of Le Parisien
A brief sociology of the members of the group shows that they are students, artists but also activists
(ecologists, socialists, and extreme-left activists) who don’t necessarily need to squat. They have
many resources (cf. Figure 7) and use it in order to mobilize journalists, officials and representatives
(Aguilera, 2011b).
2.3.2. Crisis, events and conjuncture as factors of attention
Some events and conjunctures cause specific cycles of attention which push public authorities to
intervene. The first factor of decision is the accident. When there is a fire, when children die in a
squat or a slum or after a building collapses officials usually announce specific public policies in
order to avoid other such catastrophes. The second factor is the political agenda. Specific
temporalities like electoral campaigns push officials to answer to social movements. Squatters and
NGOs know that candidates are quite vulnerable in the sense that they are building programs and
they cannot refuse some claims from civil society. During these periods, political opportunity
structure open and the conjuncture appears as an opportunity for housing movements’ groups to get
consideration from the political sphere. Thus, the agenda follows the “politics of attention” described
by Baumgartner and Jones in 2005: representatives and media focus on one topic at a certain
moment.
Squats and slums are targets of public policies but not always and for the same reasons. In the next
section, I focus on the policy instruments implemented by local public actors.