“Quartiers Solidaires” or Neighborhoods United Together is an alternative press agency active in a number of « cités » (housing projects) in France. Their main purpose is to write their own stories in order to resist to the common image that the mainstream media gives of them and their residents.

With two objectives in mind: recuperation of the media representation of their neighborhoods and creating ties between the different neighborhoods and its residents, “Quartiers Solidaires” calls out to people to participate in the making of their magazine by covering stories independently. Keeping in mind the main goal, which is the creation of a network where different activists can gather contacts and exchange ideas, the founders of “Quartier Solidaires” are still trying to establish their project. Founded by a group of young activists who created an organization called “Feet in the PAF” (PAF= Border Police) in the 1989, “Quartiers Solidaires” is the extension of their project to defend the needs of television audiences during the Gulf War and after a number of riots in certain “tough” neighborhoods. At that time, the “Feet in the PAF” activists denounced what they saw as a “demonization of our neighborhoods”.

“We are not the owners of our project. On the contrary, we would like our first issue to create a collective for people in our neighborhoods to express themselves bringing together all of those who want to fight together against marginalization, stigmatization, censuring and to create a network of direct information between our neighborhoods.”

“Quartiers Solidaires” hopes to bring together all the different active people who are taking their “image” into the own hands: associations, radios, services Internet, neighborhood newspapers, video groups, HLM television (HLM= housing tenement), etc.

In order to launch this operation “Quartiers Solidaires” started off by setting up a summer school for initiating the youth in different neighborhoods to different media techniques, writing, filming on video, etc. These workshops helped these youth come in direct contact with the tools used to “cover their stories” by the mainstream media, but also gave them a chance to understand how they could take the initiative to do the same.

One of these new initiatives took place this summer in Grigny in the Essonne region. This project, called "Sport-Insertion-Video” gave the opportunity to about 30 teenagers to make short documentaries in automobile garages in their region. They learned how to work with video and became familiar with the work. The films were watched by a jury and a young 23 year old, Christophe Marquet, was given a prize of 90,000 Francs for his work.

“Quartiers Solidaires” is still getting off the ground and the organizers are calling out for people to cover stories, contact them and to participate in this self-organizing endeavor.

CECIL (Quartiers solidaires)
BP 19, 93201 Saint Denis
EMail : quartiers.solidaires@globenet.org