(AFP) – David Coquille bikes around Marseille, the second largest city in France. Then, meticulously, post photos on the social network
“Once, my foot passed through a step. Behind these facades, sometimes, you discover staircases supported by props, buildings which should have already been in danger. One day I ended up bringing back bedbugs bed at home”, says this journalist from La Marseillaise, the historic daily newspaper of the Mediterranean city founded in 1943 by the Communist Party.
“He does a fantastic job of going to see all the danger orders, putting them on a map with the date, all this information… It’s an extraordinary database,” comments architect Thierry Durousseau.
For the journalist, as for many other Marseillais, the trial which is currently being held around the collapses of buildings near the Old Port of Marseille, rue d'Aubagne, which left eight dead in 2018, is “a trial for History” as La Marseillaise titled it.
“One day, a lady contacted me. She had rented an Airbnb with her grandson near the Opera. Bed fleas, stairs with props everywhere,” remembers the man who is known as @DavidLaMars on X. “I asks her for the address, I look in our lists and I say to her: +but Madam, this building is under serious and imminent danger, that is to say, occupation is prohibited.
– Political inaction –
The case will end up in court. Some 2,300 travelers had passed through this dangerous building. The owner, a mason in his sixties, was sentenced in 2021 to a one-year suspended prison sentence and a ban on purchasing property with a view to renting it out for five years.
“We were helped by people inside the system, people within public organizations who come to tell you: + have you seen that name? + to cross-check,” explains David Coquille.
Behind these denunciations is also active a network of residents who have become activists, by force of circumstances, in the face of decades of political inaction, in a city housing some 40,000 slums. Nordine Abouakil, one of the founders of the association A city center for all, is one of the historical figures in this struggle.
He was “pained” but “not surprised” by the drama on rue d’Aubagne. So, shortly after, he arrived in the editorial offices with a shopping bag full of documents collected over the years from the mortgage service and a mission: to establish what belonged to the town hall, then headed by Jean-Claude Gaudin (right), or its satellites.
Because on rue d'Aubagne, of the two adjoining buildings which collapsed simultaneously, one was a private co-ownership but the other, uninhabited and left in a state of ruin, belonged to the city's social landlord, Marseille Habitat, in the dock today.
– “Public health” –
“We leave the building abandoned because we don't want it to be reoccupied by the same poor population”, “the only fear is the squatters”, sighs Nordine Abouakil.
A sort of consortium, unprecedented in the local press, was then created, led by La Marseillaise, the local Marsactu and national investigative sites Mediapart and Le Ravi, a local satirical newspaper which has since disappeared. Objective: to analyze nearly 5,500 transactions.
They released a survey at the end of 2019, called “The Great Vacancy”, which identified some 70 buildings left abandoned.
“The town hall had completely lost sight of its heritage,” explains Benoît Gilles, co-editor-in-chief of Marsactu. In 2016, he denounced the state of disrepair at 63 rue d'Aubagne and the daily Libération devoted a portrait to him, praising his work in “public sanitation”.
Six years later, after more than 600 articles on substandard housing, “we are in the process of taking stock” of the new left-wing municipality which has made it a priority, he explains.
But a form of weariness appears in the face of this endless fight.
“We, activists, are not required to do everything. We make our contribution, and it was substantial. But the rest is up to politicians to take charge of. And it is up to the justice system to condemn,” said Nordine Abouakil.
