Contenu du sommaire : Centres-villes : modèles, luttes, pratiques

Montreuil, “Paris' 21st arrondissement”Since the 1970s, the old working class neighborhoods located in the heart of big cities are being transformed by the arrival of young upper middle class households who rehabilitate these neighborhoods, both materially and figuratively. The recent spread of this gentrification phenomenon to the immediate suburban belt of Paris sheds light on the extent and significance of the work done by these gentrifiers : while they are led to these neighborhoods by financial constraints, they work on all their dimensions – physical, social, symbolic – in order to erase their suburban character and give them the attributes of old central neighborhoods – density, diversity, history, centrality. What is at stake in this fight is the displacement of the boundary between desirable and undesirable neighborhoods, in terms of the tastes and norms defining the “new middle class,” and thus the restoration of a downward residential trajectory. The fine-grained analysis of the social mobilization of lower Montreuil's gentrifiers in the 1990s and 2000s reveals the concrete mechanisms of space appropriation and the importance of social-residential distinctions.

La vi(ll)e en rose ?
Despite the emergence of “gay neighborhoods” in the heart of Western metropolises in the past few decades, the ways in which their resident gay population relate to these urban spaces are little known. This paper scrutinizes this new figure of urban centrality through the lens of the trajectories, the lifestyles and the ways of being gay expressed by the residents of two gay neighborhoods located in Paris and Montreal. The recovery of their social and spatial trajectories, the analysis of their practices and their representations make it possible to identify several ways of becoming part of these neighborhoods and living there : the gay neighborhood is experienced in very different ways, depending upon the trajectories and the social characteristics of individuals. This result challenges some of the stigmatizing and homogenizing representations of gay neighborhoods and contemporary homosexuality.

Once upon a time... there were children in the gentrified neighborhoods of Paris and San Francisco
How do children from different social backgrounds live and coexist in gentrified areas ? Do we observe among this population a greater social diversity than what the literature on gentrification suggests ? This paper addresses these questions on the basis of a survey conducted with children between 9 and 11 years old (and their parents) living in two gentrified neighborhoods located in Paris and San Francisco. The results of this survey make it possible to look differently at the relationships of coexistence that can be observed in inner city neighborhoods. In these very specific contexts of socialization, children are more involved than their parents in practices of social diversity. Yet, these practices also vary with the type of involvement parents have with the neighborhood and, more generally, with the degree of social diversity.

“It takes all kinds to make a world”The development of European institutions has radically transformed the center of the Belgian capital, but the recent emergence of a eurocratic milieu cannot be equated with a process of traditional gentrification. This paper privileges an approach based on urban history and on the sociology of the actors who contributed to developing Brussels' European district. It shows how the legitimate uses of several upper class neighborhoods have changed and become convergent since the 1960s. Based on several sources (in particular statistical sources), the paper intends to combine the history of the real estate strategy of European institutions with the economic logic that determines the strategies of local brokers, of the Belgian state and of the intermediate chain of entrepreneurs who leave their symbolic and material mark on this urban center by developing commercial offers targeting the “temporary expatriates.”

La Goutte d'Or, 30 July 1955 : insurrection in the heart of the colonial metropole
Urban insurrections are usually analyzed in relation to the history of suburban neighborhoods and large housing projects. By relating an insurrection to the central position of immigrants in Paris, it becomes possible to shed light on different continuities and genealogies. Thus, the study of the insurrection of July 30, 1955, in the neighborhood of La Goutte d'Or in the 18th arrondissement of Paris makes it possible to leave behind the spatial focus characterizing the attempts at historicizing urban violence. At the intersection of several traditions of social mobilization (workers movement, popular resistance against disciplinary institutions, anticolonial struggles), this episode has instantiated an insurrectional logic of action many components of which can be identified in various insurrectional episodes that have taken place since the 1970s. It thus seems that public discourse and policing patterns, more than geographic segmentations, shape the spaces within which insurrections appear to be answers to political and social domination.