Youth, economic marginalization and urban skills in Lyon, Shanghai and Milano

French team members:

Supervised by Laurence Roulleau-Berger, Research Director at CNRS, ENS Lyon

-Grégory Giraudo, Doctor in sociology, Triangle

-Marie Bellot, Ph D Student Lyon 2, Triangle

-Béatrice Zani, Ph.D Student, ENS Lyon

-Colette Bottazzi, Master 2 Asioc, ENS Lyon

-Verena Richardier, Ph D Student ENS Lyon, Triangle

-Marie-Astrid Gillier, Ph D Student ENS Lyon, Triangle

Chinese team members

Supervised by Liu Yuzhao, Professor and Deputee Director of School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai University LIA’s Coordinator

-Luo Erjiade, Professor at University of Tsinghua, Beijing

-Yan Jun, Lecturer, School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai University

-Su Liang, Ph.D. Student, School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai University 

Abstract

In France and in China labour uncertainty and instability have produced urban labour markets that reinforce social inequalities and discriminations. The transformations produce differentiated « work regimes » that affect different categories of young urban people.

 In Shanghai and Beijing's outskirts, during the last decade in transitional areas between city and countryside, disadvantaged youths have settled in recently built housing projects in which displaced youths from the city centers and the countryside already live. It is a new phenomenon of co-presence of different groups in situation of great economic vulnerability.

In the working-class neighbourhoods of Lyon, with the multiplication of social inequalities, ethnic discrimination, instability of work, young people with little qualifications are massively and violently cast away from the urban labour market or working in precarious, disqualified and  dirty  work. These young people in situation of social vulnerability develop socialization patterns in grey areas of economic uncertainty between center and fringes of urban employment. They are engaged in discontinuous economic socialization processes, fragmented by forced bifurcations leading either to professional integrations on the labour market or urban disaffiliation. Simultaneously, in these working-class neighbourhoods, young people create invisibilized skills repertoire in spaces of low urban legitimacy (intermediary spaces, associations, ethnic trade/shops). The issue at stake is then of the either partial, almost total, or non-translation of the skills produced in these low-legitimacy urban spaces to spaces of high economic legitimacy which produce a strong social recognition on the urban labour-markets.