A Critical Reading of Neighborhood-based Policies and their Geography

A large number of interventions developed by institutional actors target a small number of circumscribed areas, with the aim of reducing social inequalities. Like any institutional division, areas concerned by neighborhood-based policies must ensure the sustainability of spatial forms of institutional actions on a territory. Neighborhood-based policies become a dangerous subterfuge when they divert attention from the deep structural causes of inequality . Taking the temporal dimension explicitly into account thus makes it possible to address the issue of the attractiveness of priority neighborhoods, which is one of the stated objectives of neighborhood-based policies. In neighborhoods where the daytime population is greater than the resident population, this type of residential indicator tends to underestimate demand, and thus overestimate the level of accessibility. The originality of neighborhood-based policies is that they define specific intervention perimeters, in which they link together the problem and its solution .