Politics on the pavement

BORDEAUX, AQUITAINE

I was listening to The Rest is Politics podcast a while ago and they were talking about how different local democracy in Britain is to local democracy in other countries. They used France as an example.

They said that in every French town people know who their mayor is, they can go up to them in the supermarket, they can challenge them and they can get a response. Whereas we are in a situation where people don’t even know the name of their local councillors.

We don’t give proper autonomy to local authorities, the presenters said, so they can’t make an impact and it ends up as little more than ceremonial.

That bit reminded me of something that happened to me in Bordeaux.

I was there researching a piece on skateboarding in the city and how the authorities had worked with skaters over a few years to integrate skating in the city (see below).

I’d hooked up with a skater called Leo Valls who is something of a hero to many in Bordeaux.

Leo set up a series of meetings for me with other skaters, photographers and also members of City Hall, as he called it.

We sat in a pavement café with the then deputy mayor Amine Smihi to talk about how the city had u-turned (or ollie-flipped in the vernacular) its approach to skaters in the city.

As we sat chatting, a woman approached the deputy mayor. She was extremely unhappy. She wanted to rant at him about her mother who was very ill in the local hospital.

I couldn’t hear the whole conversation but I was so impressed with him.

He didn’t fob her off or ask her to contact his secretary blah blah. Neither was he surprised to be approached.

He listened to her. The skaters listened to her. There was a respect that I can’t recall seeing in Britain. And it was genuine. He wanted to hear her gripes. He gave her his time without question. It went on and on and he didn’t rush her. It was quite shocking.

After she had gone, he was totally accepting that this was part of his public role:

“There is no part of my job that comes without resistance,” he said. “You have two ways with local politics: you touch nothing and everything stays the same or you have a political vision and you make change.”

I’m not saying Smihi was a hero or anything, and I’m not saying that France doesn’t have its own set of problems.

It was just so interesting because it was so culturally different to what you’d see in England. Would you be shocked if you had seen that exchange in the town where you live?