Abstract
A banlieue is strictly defined as the peripheral urbanized zone surrounding a big city. The word had become quite pejorative, giving birth to its definition as "a marginalized zone mainly occupied by people from African origin? or to words like banlieusard, which is assimilated to a person, most of the time young with no occupation, always wandering in the banlieue. Lately, especially since the 2005 riots, we have talked about French banlieues that are compared to ghettos. The word ghetto was first used to talk about the Jews who were forced to gather in certain areas during the Second World War. It means either the area of a city where lives a minority who are not properly integrated to the society or a self-contained social environment. Can banlieues be compared to American ghettos? And if to a certain extent, it reached some of the aspects of these ghettos, is this deliberate move or more the result of a marginalization by the society? We try to find answers to these questions in this document.
