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ABSTRACT
The article aims to investigate whether social segregation in urban areas can be reduced by transferring jurisdiction over urban planning from municipalities to the inter-municipal level. Specifically, we analyse the evolution of social segregation between 1968 and 2010 in French inter-municipal cooperation structures exercising jurisdiction over urban planning since at least 1995 and compare it with that of groupings of municipalities that do not have this competence. In order to minimise the risk of selection bias we use difference-in-difference matching methods. The effects revealed by the analysis are mixed and show that the success of this transfer of competence depends on the communities’ intentions as well as on the extent of responsibilities that have been transferred.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the Association des Communautés de France (AdCF) for having made available the results of their survey on inter-municipal land use plans.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Urban agglomerations in France are typically composed of tens, hundreds or even more than thousand municipalities, as is the case for the Paris metropolitan area.
2. An EPCI or établissement public de coopération inter-municipale is a public administrative body for inter-municipal cooperation. EPCI are supra-municipal structures that can raise taxes. They are created voluntarily by neighbouring municipalities who jointly decide which local public services to delegate to the EPCI.
3. At least in France, where the members of the governing bodies of inter-municipal cooperation structures (EPCI) are not directly elected but designated by the municipal councils of the member municipalities.
4. This multi-layered system includes strategic plans on the regional and intermediate urban level and regulatory land use plans on the local (municipal or intermunicipal) level. Disregarding the regional level, these plans are not mandatory and the territories covered are based on voluntary cooperation between municipalities and/or EPCI. Over the period studied, the intermediate (in principle, metropolitan) planning level did not play a very prominent role.
5. According to the French Ministry for Territorial Cohesion and Relations with Local Government, 631 out of 1255 EPCI (i.e., 50,3%) were competent in matters of land use planning on 31st of December 2019.
6. urban in the sense that the most populous municipality is located in a functional urban area (‘aire urbaine’) as defined by the French national statistical institute INSEE.
7. The study conducted by AdCF only focused on EPCI, i.e., inter-municipal groupings with the power to tax, whereas the Yearbook published by the Ministry of the Interior also identified other, less integrated, forms of inter-municipal cooperation structures called syndicats intercommunaux in French. Some of these syndicats have meanwhile been transformed into EPCI. We have tried to identify those that have undergone such a transformation in order to incorporate them into our analysis.
8. Besides that, the extent of ethnic or racial segregation is difficult to evaluate in the French case, as census data does not include any information on an individual’s racial or ethnic affiliation. The only information available is a person’s country of birth and nationality.
9. Data on the distribution of revenues has only become available more recently, and for municipalities of a certain size. But the existing work for more recent periods has shown that there is generally a strong correlation between socio-economic segregation evaluated on the basis of socio-professional categories and income segregation. See Floch (Citation2017).
10. In its broadest version, the French classification of professions and socio-professional categories includes a sixth category, farmers. As is general practice in the literature, this category has been excluded from our analysis, and this for several reasons. First of all, farmers generally only represent a very small percentage of urban populations, and besides that their location is generally exogenously determined by the availability and quality of agricultural land. Second, indicators of multi-group segregation are only meaningful if they are calculated for territories comprising at least as many sub-territories as groups. If we had included a sixth group into our analysis, we would thus have been obliged to leave out a considerable number of observations.
11. This data, produced by the Socio-Political Data Base, Grenoble, was made available to us by the Centre for Socio-Political Data of the Quetelet network. We consider the Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR), the Centre Réformateur Républicain (CRR), the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), the Centre National des Indépendants (CNIP) and the Modérés as right-wing parties.
12. All estimations were carried out in Stata using the ‘psmatch2’ command developed by Leuven and Sianesi (Citation2003).
13. The concept of an ‘aire urbaine”, defined by the French national statistical institute INSEE, encompasses an urban core providing at least 5.000 jobs and the surrounding suburban/periurban municipalities among which at least 40% of the employed population works in the urban core or in another municipality itself attracted to it. In 1999, there existed 354 aires urbaines in metropolitan France, encompassing about one third of all municipalities.
14. Besides that, two EPCI with jurisdiction over land use planning, had to be excluded from the analysis because the number of municipalities in these EPCI was too small to be able to calculate meaningful indicators of diversity or segregation.
15. This distinction is based on responses to the AdCF survey (AdCF Citation2013), see paragraph 4.1.
16. This distinction is based on information given by the Yearbook of inter-municipal cooperation (DGCL Citation1996).
17. This information being only available for the EPCI that are responsible for land use plans, we have not made any new estimations. The results in and 6 are therefore based on previous matchings, see the upper part of .
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Katharina Schone
Katharina Schone is an associate professor in economics at the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté in France, and member of the Laboratoire d’Economie de Dijon (LEDi). Her research interest lies in local policies regarding land use and housing, and is presently focussed on the evaluation of measures in favour of sustainable urban planning.