Ageing, Social Change, and pauperization: The Housing Stock and the Challenge of Population Renewal in the Nord - Pas-de-Calais Coal-Mining Basin (France)

While the arrival of full generations of baby-boomers signals a demographic ageing and a sharp increase in the number of elderly people throughout France, the Nord - Pas-de-Calais is characterised by a very slow increase in elderly people, both proportionally and numerically. This absence of ageing is the result, on the one hand, of the demographic behaviour of local populations, marked by relatively high birth and mortality rates, and, on the other hand, a powerful emigration process which progressively shattered the baby-boom generations. In mining towns, and especially in mining districts, the beneficiaries of the coal-mining industryrepresent a significant and dramatically ageing population, whose average age is 77. Over the course of the next two decades, the death of theses miners and miners' widows will entail a powerful rejuvenation and demographic renewal process. The mining habitations will be vacated owing to the death of their tenants. These often unattractive habitations, which are stigmatised in the urban landscape, now attract the underprivileged. The housing market as well as the strategies of the social landlords, of the SOGINORPA (the owner of mining habitations), and of local players direct the poorest households to these particular habitations. The decline of the elderly population in mining districts thus leads to the creation of pockets of poverty within the mining basin.