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Rehabilitation of deprived inner city areas - European perspectives

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21 June 2019
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The rehabilitation of deprived inner city areas is a complex process, embedded in the whole city's context. In France, a new program concerning the rehabilitation of deprived inner city areas was launched in 2009. Studying it at a European level can provide an interesting opening. Lucia Garcia has addressed this issue. Read the report "PDF icon Download QAD_Europe_Rapport_Puca_LGarcia.pdf (75.14 KB)Rehabilitation of deprived inner city areas - European perspectives".

In spite of decades of urban policies aimed at eradicating deprived housing, there are still nowadays districts where the situation remained unimproved. With the French program on rehabilitation of deprived inner city areas, the idea is to develop an integrated urban development, steered at a national level (through the incentives of two agencies, Anah and ANRU and the ministry in charge of housing) and applied at a local level (at the municipality or metropolitan level). The implementation of this program is still in process and the idea arose that it would be interesting to go to other European cities and see how the rehabilitation of deprived inner city areas is done abroad. The aim was to come back with some good practices and ways of dealing with deprived inner city areas.

Four main themes were selected:

  • the relationship between the housing market and the strategies implemented (in situation of tensed housing market or not),
  • the different strategies of the public sector,
  • the attitude regarding the resilience of urban forms in these particular districts,
  • ways of dealing with the current inhabitants of the area, linked to the goal of urban diversity.


The sites were also selected thanks to specific criteria that are mainly the availability of data, the presence of a recent rehabilitation project in the inner city area and the size of the city. At the end, four cities involved in URBACT were selected: Brasov in Romania, Bristol in England, Halle in Germany and Porto in Portugal.

According to Lucie Garcia, "the contexts of the cities we got interested in are all very different and it is necessary to realize that the main objective was not to build comparisons with France or to consider the practices on a hierarchical basis. Thanks to this study, we managed to gather ways of dealing with the rehabilitation of deprived inner city areas".


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