08 November 2022 12:10
It is 9 am on Saturday 5th November. The climate is serene but cool, even if until a week ago here in Marseille people used to go to the beach.
A few hundred people are gathered in front of a white hole, the void that was once filled by the buildings of 63 and 65 rue d’Aubagne, in the Noailles district, between the Canébière – the course that leads from the station to the old porto – and cours Julien, the area of street art and clubs. We are in the heart of the second French city, in an emblematic district of diversity (the mixture), where the vegetable market and the butchers coexist halalspice warehouses and a historic homeware shop that is transforming, like everything else, into a tourist destination.
The reason for the small gathering, in which we see groups of friends, more or less young militants, some musicians and a couple of reporters, is the anniversary of the collapse of two buildings, which took place exactly four years ago. In front of eight lighted torches, eight minutes of silence are observed, one for each victim.
Eight minutes to think
Their names are engraved on a bronze plaque posted a few meters away in the center of the square which once bore the name of the poet Homer and which for two years has been renamed place 5 novembre. Those names, like their faces, portrayed in photographs on a sign above them, make it clear that even the victims of the collapse were a good champion of the diversity of the neighborhood. Four in their fifties: a mother of a Comorian family, a French woman and a man and a Tunisian; two in their thirties: an Algerian and a Peruvian; and two in their twenties, a Senegalese and an Italian, who came here to study at the university. Eight minutes is a long time: staying silent allows you to think about many things also because since then, in Marseille, many things have happened.
Bernard Eynaud, president of the local Ligue des droits de l’homme, shaved hair and very short white beard, says that, even if other incidents had occurred shortly before, the central area and the identity of the victims deeply shaken the city. “We suddenly realized that that collapse did not happen by chance.” But this awareness has provoked different reactions.
Marseille, 2019. Left: Fabien, 51, with three children. He was able to go home after four months. Right: Julie on the balcony of her apartment in Corso Lieutaud. She had to live in a hotel with her three children for five months, due to the wall of a building next door which was in danger of collapsing.
(Anthony Micallef)
The municipality (the municipality) then led by the center-right mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin, in office for more than twenty years, and the metropole (the local authority that in France has important powers in the largest urban aggregations) at first they tried to shed their responsibilities, to hide behind the fact that in those days there had been heavy rains, invoking the status of “catastrophe natural”.
Then they began to evict people and families from some apartments using for the first time massively the tool of theimminent danger order, a sort of injunction that allows the eviction by the police. More than 4,500 people who lived in unsafe or neighboring buildings were thus forced to move to hotels or other secondary residences, in a hasty and violent way.
In the city, meanwhile, protests began to be organized against those who, despite knowing the poor state of their homes, had allowed people like the victims of November 5 to live in inhumane conditions. A video still visible on YouTube shows an apartment in one of the two collapsed buildings. It was shot by a concerned citizen just hours before the collapse. The inhabitants began to reflect on the different responsibilities: those of the owners, the so-called “sleep merchants”, of the public authorities, who then had only two officials in charge of verifying the state of the housing throughout the city, up to the real estate agencies. They set themselves two objectives: in the medium term, to protect the displaced, over a longer period, to ensure that such a situation never happens again.
The attempt was to transform the management of an emergency into an opportunity to reflect on a social problem
Thus was born the Collectif du 5 November which in a few months managed to get the prefect and the entire municipal council (only the far right left the classroom) to sign a Charte de relogement des personnes evacuées (a protocol to provide accommodation to evacuated persons) which established a series of rights for those who had had to give up their home (compensation, type of temporary accommodation, conditions for returning after the restoration work).
According to Bernard, these were rights already established by law, but which had to be reaffirmed, rewritten in black and white so that they could be effectively claimed.
The point about changes
Around five in the afternoon, at the Coco Velten social center, a round table begins to take stock of four years of struggles. Kevin Vacher, a 30-year-old activist from the Collectif, introduces the guests, confessing that for this year he was a little afraid of demobilization, but that the full room reassures him. Among the participants, it is up to Molly Fournel, of the commission délogé · es, the task of explaining what novelties the new dislodged charterwhich the movements managed to get the new center-left junta to sign in 2020.
Fournel explains that to the acquired rights were added those relating to the protection of displaced persons who did not have registered rents, of those who needed interpreters and of those who, despite owning the apartments, did not have the money to repair them.
After her, many speak, taking stock of the many changes that the collapse has triggered: the various trials that have taken place (civil, administrative and criminal); the collaboration between the administration and associations, which has since made it possible to centralize the information on unhealthy rents previously scattered, to multiply the number of inspectors (today there are about a hundred) and which is suggesting a new idea of social housing, different from that of segregation , which here in Marseille has produced some of the quoted poorest in Europe. When she is handed the microphone, Sophie Camard, mayor of the urban sector to which she refers Noailles, explains that she has tried to transform the management of an emergency into an opportunity to reflect on a social problem.
There are still many problems, but in the room there is a certain pride with respect to these four years of commitment, on the stage the hope is expressed that the experience relating to the Marseille case will become useful for producing new laws and new addresses at the national level . Most of those present had a long day.
Despite the anniversary, there are many who have not given up passing in front of the town hall to welcome Mimmo Lucano, who has reached the last stage of his solidarity caravan which left Riace, on the occasion of which the new mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan, offered him a medal. The political climate has changed compared to 2018. In the opinion of many, the protests of the movements that arose as a result of the collapse of Noailles played a decisive role.