Al Ain: A researcher at the UAE University has won an outstanding award for his study on the connection between violence and areas where low-income earners live.
The study, entitled Ban-lieues and Violence, is based on the French urban unrest of 2005 in which angry groups of unemployed youngsters went on the rampage and vandalised property, burnt cars and scorched schools in several towns.
The word 'banlieue' is a French word for 'outskirts', used frequently to describe areas of low income people in cities.
The award will be handed to Dr Bechir Kenzari, Associate Professor at the UAE University's Department of Architectural Engineering, on February 23 in Gozo, Malta.
Talking to Gulf News in Al Ain on Thursday, Kenzari said his paper had been voted the best in its track by the Conference for Academic Disciplines to be held later this month in Gozo.
"It is indeed a big honour for me and the UAE University given the range and expertise of scholars attending [the conference]," he said. The Gozo conference is organised by the prestigious International Journal of Arts and Science (IJAS), he said.
The conference tackles contemporary technological and social issues pertaining to engineering and technology, social sciences and humanities, business and economics, teaching and education, physical and life sciences and interdisciplinary studies.
Talking about his study, Kenzari said the research involved the three-week long French case to highlight its argument.
"Triggered by the electrocution of two boys who were fleeing the police in the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois, these émeutes (riots) quickly engulfed other impoverished suburbs throughout the whole country. In reacting to this "profound malaise," as the former French president called it, the government was forced to reactivate the law of the state of emergency for the first time since the Algerian war in 1955," the paper states.
Kenzari said measures to stop the riots were taken but, substantially, no serious long-term solutions were envisaged. Two years later, in the fall of 2007, the same riots surfaced again mostly in the Parisian region when two teenagers from Villiers-le-Bel, riding on a mini-bike, died after they collided with a police car.
Kenzari said a polymorphous phenomenon constitutes the most visible aspect of the condition of violence in these cities.
"Structural factors such as the accelerated deterioration of the urban environment and public services, the massive long-term unemployment, and the ethnic and geographical stigmatisation appeared to be the real causes underling the phenomenon," he said.
"These factors mirror the functioning of a political system where the members of one specific category of French society (mainly of Arab and African origins) have found themselves living as refugees in segregated high-rise dilapidated housing, routinely stopped by the police for identity check," he noted.
The research argues that areas where the failure of architecture seems to cause more anxiety today is not the metropolis but these forgotten banlieues, at the periphery of major European cities. "Architecture here reveals itself more like a spectre than a constructive manifestation," he said.
In these zones, he said, which function more like camps than residential areas, communities from Africa and the southern banks of the Mediterranean have been banned from participating in the economic, political and cultural life of the host environment.
"Living like refugees under the banner of exclusion, they have become modern urban pariahs who, in times of crisis, take it to the street to express their frustration and despair," said the professor.
