Decades of accumulation of migration flows and the constitution of stocks of immigrants in French Guyana triggered issues going over simple concerns of crude birth rates and crude death rates. The general increase of the population, its diverse compositions and its spatial distribution point out serious contentions dividing the local political system and the major political actors on key public policy choices regarding urban and housing policy planning, poverty reduction and migrants’ socio-spatial integration in French Guyana. The politics and policy concerns over population-migration and urbanization transcend not only French Guyana, but also reach the core France in its interactions with some neighboring states in Latin America and the Caribbean. Definitely, the population composition and relocation in its diverse causes and effects become a serious political demography and urban governance challenges.
1.1 Portraying the Demographic Shift in the Cayenne’s Rapid Urbanization
The historic context of 1970–1982 in French Guyana was marked by two crucial events.
First, some important infrastructural development projects started to fill the gap between the other core France’s territorial entities and other French overseas departments. The infrastructural constructions initiated by the state went along with a socioeconomic and agricultural bid to promote economic growth, prosperity and development in French Guyana.
Second, during the first half of the 1980s, the elected socialist government in France and the late President François Mitterrand promoted decentralization as a political approach and method of modernizing and engineering the state and the governance of territorial collectivities. As a result, decentralization of the public policy and the decision-making process was given in part to local elected officials and territorial governing bodies to tackle key public policy issues.
Taken both, separately and interactively, the decades of 1970 and 1980 played an important role in shaping the variables of population-migration growth linked to socioeconomic and spatial development in French Guyana.
In this perspective, the arrival from neighboring countries of thousands of guest migrant workers highlights the importance of human influxes during the decade of 1970. The strategies of urban settlements differ from one ethnic community to another. Rapidly, the continuation of fluxes of migrants created the constitution of stocks of population with different social and ethno-cultural backgrounds. These changes in the French Guyanese society not only allowed the constitution of stocks of populations, but also sparked ethno-cultural and economic claims in terms of (among others) good living conditions in housing, Medicare and other social benefits for the population of French Guyana becoming a multicultural one by the end of 1970s.
However, in the beginning of 1980s, all the socioeconomic, ethnic, demographic, geographic and political conditions were gathered on the ground to rethink immigration policy (management of influxes) in French Guyana in light of migrant policy (management of stock) and as an issue of public policy efficiency and good governance.
Additionally, migrants’ choices of integration and/or reintegration in the origin countries or in the host one causing urban relocation, inter- and intra-urban mobility, housing construction patterns, the claim for good public urban services for all, schooling the second generation of migrants, or more importantly, the new French citizens in French Guyana with immigrant decent, reducing urban poverty and inequality in a composite population, pave the way to elevate the problem of population-migration, socioeconomic development and housing conditions in an environment of urban sprawling and urban policy planning as a political demography issue.
This new political demography problematic ground is more suited to encircle the diversity and the complexity of the connection of housing, population density, urban sprawling and public policy efficiency.
These issues beg the following questions. How population-migration influx, population re-composition, urban housing and urban policy planning combined with ethno-cultural claims enfold political demography in French Guyana—and more broadly, how the above-mentioned problems draw the conceptual and the theoretical contours of political demography and urbanization-migration?
In order to answer the interrogations, it is important to evaluate the manifestation of the demographic problems in daily life of the inhabitants. In the Cayenne agglomeration, the capital city of the department of French Guyana, statistics over birth rates, death rates and migration rates intersect with family size, population size, households and housing construction.
Also, the re-composition of the population and its diverse socio- and ethno-cultural experiences affect not only the culture of reproduction and procreation, but also the spatial distribution of the population in housing in various communes and neighborhoods of the Cayenne agglomeration.
The spatial distribution of the population and its claims for netter living conditions not only change the composition of the urban population, but also modify the nature of social and ethnic claims linking at times (not always) society and community logics.
As a result, in their different causes and effects, population-migration, urban housing, spatial mobility and urban policy planning transform traditional political district and redesign the local political maps in urban sections of the agglomeration.
Aside from the above-mentioned changes, the willingness to allocate financial resources by some urban local elected officials goes in pair with their political views on immigration, on public policy agenda, design and implementation. Often, political actors and elected officials are divided on inclusion or exclusion of some segments of society in regard to local public policy.
The opposition on immigration policy does not divide only local players in the local political system over the composition of the population and the effectiveness of public policy, but also conflicts with the core France and the French state which, at times, uses immigration in its foreign policy in the region and elsewhere in the world to maintain a certain level of geopolitical influence and ambitions.
Moreover, generally speaking what is political demography?
According to Wiener and Teitelbaum (2001: 10), “Political demography is the study of size, composition, and distribution of population in relation to both government and politics. It is concerned with the political consequences of population change, especially the effects of population change on the demands made upon governments, on the performance of governments, on the distribution of political power among within states, and on the distribution of national power among states. It also considers the political determinants of population change, especially the political causes of the movement of people, the relationship of various population configurations to the structure and functions of government, and public policies directed at affecting the size, composition and distribution of populations”.
Regarding this definition, political demography goes over the narrowly and traditional concepts and analytical tools in demography to stretch its domain of definition toward political science, economics, sociology, geography, etc.…
In this view, how population-migration, urban housing and urban policy planning in Fr...