ABSTRACT
‘Housing and Exclusion’ are two terms the definition of which seems obvious today. However, what common sense considers excluded most often represents individuals — rather than social groups — not included within society or kept apart from collective or individual benefits produced by the system. Amongst the many reasons put forward to try to explain the exclusion processes are those which no longer hesitate to make the individual responsible for himself and even for his socio-ethnic origin. Social constraints then become ‘cognitive’ problems and social problems of individual behaviour systems arise from lack of socio-cultural adaptation. Then we need to find ethno-psychological explanations which would make it possible in time to better socialise the individual in order to adapt him to his new social space, the town or city. Therefore the town again becomes — or does not cease to become — a privileged space of delimitation and determinism of the social order which produces socio-ethnic stigmas (Economie et Humanisme, 1993). Media discussions on the exclusion and housing of those least favoured, tend in the vagueness of ethnic social and political representations to relate the image of the other to his living conditions. The deviant, the delinquent, the immigrant or the unemployed become excluded and the spaces where they live are ‘exclusion zones’ (Ballain et Benguigui, 1995).
