83

Based on a collective survey carried out between 2017 and 2020 on the restructuring of social housing allocation and settlement policies in six French agglomerations, this paper examines the categorisation processes at work in local social housing policies. First, we show that despite the legislative clarification of the principle of social mix and the reallocation of roles provided by the 2017 Equality and Citizenship Act, the majority of local actors continue to mobilise previous ethnoracial categories. Ethnoracial referents still occupy a salient place in the social representations of actors and the way they perceive allocation situations. Then, we highlight processes of discrete ethnicisation and racialisation, built on criteria perceived as more legitimate than overtly ethnic or racial criteria. Finally, we analyse the social conditions that make it possible to maintain ethnoracial categories beyond the Equality and Citizenship Act.