Menu de gauche

Leaders of social and urban projects are
reflecting on their work, which is midway
between a mission impossible and
a mediating feat. This highly relationship-
based occupation, initially militant,
has become institutionalised over
time, mainly through becoming mainstreamed
into municipal structures. The
many tensions pervading daily activities
 both technical and political, local
and central, spatial and social - together
with status fragmentation, limit
the building of a joint professional reference
framework. The project leader is
becoming the emblematic figure of
change in current urban governance.

Urban occupations have difficulty in
fitting into professional associations
since they function at the interface between
different fields of activity. Yet
urban management is increasingly
demanding intersectoral skills, for which
moreover, women do just as well as men.
These new skills are capable of regenerating
local democracy through the coproduction
of services.

For the past few years in France, public
buildings have been undergoing assessment.
This assessment procedure which
places emphasis on the various uses of
buildings, has had to take into account
the initial architectural design, and performance
and safety standards. To prevent
conflicting uses, site engineers are
invited, on the basis of these assessments,
to meet the users to learn about
their ordinary daily behaviour patterns.
Their technical and administrative task
is broadening out to embrace the ritual
or hidden dimension of practices.

Destroyed neighbourhoods, lack of spatial
serviceability, social selfishness, running
down of local life, residential confinement,
trapping in ghettos. These are
common themes of urban dramatisation.
The distinctive feature of these
images is that they do not translate into
practical solutions, as the worst situations
are always elsewhere. The discrepancy
between practices and how they
are represented is making urban political
professionals increasingly confused
about the implications of their work.

For senior executives to be more conversant
with planning and development
tasks, they must pay attention to ordinary
work, as they did recently in the
field of social sciences for the work of frontline officers. Identifying the elements
of a problem and showing them
on paper, using the rule of the law as an
instrument of dialogue, being able to
extricate an infrastructure project from
its fetters, are all important activities for
the managers of a County Public Works
Directorate

In urban planning projects, such as the
Paris-Bercy operation, many agreements
are based on the regulations of the initiating
authority, the architectural instructions
of the co-ordinating project
engineer and the expression of the selected
architects. A new figure in this field
is the architect in charge of urban coordination,
who basis his legitimacy on
his ability to achieve project integration
while preserving project integrity.

Although childminders have the task of
socializing infants, theirs is a small urban
women’s job with professional contours
that remain blurred. But by observing
practices, we can see the local significance
in urban neighbourhoods of
childminding and the many other services
it provides for city-dwellers. The
domestic skills of childminders and
childcarers are elements of support for
the public environment.

In recent years, France’s property sector
has been rediscovering the benefits
of caretakers. The caretaker, a legacy
of the past century’s concierge, has
become the equivalent of a housing
unit service provider. As the number
of dwellings requiring caretakers
increases, so do the social and technical
skills required. A recent survey on
low-cost housing companies showed
that their caretakers consider their
administrative management tasks more
satisfying than their contacts with the
tenants.

Low-cost housing organisations are torn
between their social role and their managerial
constraints. Their public offices
have to cope with the increased social
precarity of tenants and are multiplying
the screens that come between them.
Only a minority of low-ranking officers
provide direct contact. In the social housing
office, these employees come between
the office staff and those who carry
out a social mission in the field.

The occupation of surveyor began in
the XIXth century for cadastral survey
work, in an organic bond with the rural
world. The rebuilding of towns destroyed
by the Great War attracted surveyors
into urban planning, where they
met up with heavy competition from
architects. Geodesy and the building of
suburban housing estates form the
urban skills of surveyors. In 1929, the
creation of a building surveyor’s diploma
by the Ecole Spéciale des Travaux
Publics (Specialised Public Works College),
via the Ecole Supérieure de Topographie
(Advanced College of Topography)
has legitimised the urbanisation
and technology-based nature of
this occupation.

For some fifty years in France, professional
community workers have been overcoming
the deficiencies of major socialising
and integrating institutions such as
schools and associations. After a phase of
equipping the country with sports and leisure
services, the State has distributed
and transferred to the local level, an eclectic
range of social insertion resources that
require the relationship skills of an increasing
number of workers.