Contenu du sommaire : Les territoires de l'informel

The contrast between formal and informal activities prevalent in public images and policies in the early 21st century is a result of modern history that has separated and categorized individuals, activities and spaces. By studying a Mexican (New Spain) 18 th century iconographic corpus, the article shows that the dissociation of formal and informal activities was reproduced in the economic and domestic spheres as well as in public and private spaces. The dominant social categories are characterized by the functional differentiation of their spaces, while the lower orders are stigmatized by the impurity resulting from the empirical fuzziness of their ethnic origins and of their living and working places.

This paper studies the interactions between mobility and rootedness in the urban trajectories of members of neighbourhood organisations in the outskirts of Rosario and Montevideo. Belonging to such organisations involves an eminently spatial dimension, which is all the more obvious in the case of community organisations. However, the registers and spatial dimensions of these organisations go well beyond the limits of the neighbourhood. Participation in these organisations generates constant and interdependent movements to and from the neighbourhood. Rootedness, here, is directly linked to habits of mobility throughout the city. Deep rootedness does not necessarily involve a phenomenon of withdrawal, but it can also be instrumental in generating greater mobility. Likewise, mobility can strengthen people's inclusion in their territory. Mobility and rootedness can indeed be entirely interdependent in which case territorial belonging is circulatory, existing only through and by comings and goings between the neighbourhood and elsewhere.

This article focuses on the practices and strategies of immigrant minorities established in a Brussels municipality where a new policy of revitalisation is taking place. The main issue is to understand the territorialisation strategies developed by minorities. It highlights the development of strategies of survival and of a quest for security of existence that are socially embedded in an urban space that is shaped by these practices. These informal practices of survival by minorities, which constitute a kind of mobility strategy, suggest a mode of autonomous regulation. This strategy is based partly on the development of social networks that transcend territories.

Informal activities contribute in large part to the development and configuration of urban spaces, particularly in those informal settlement areas in which a third of the world's urban population live. However, these areas are not produced exclusively by informal practices. Public policies together with legal and institutional practices play a major role in their configuration. They orientate the informal practices, determine the location of the settlements and contribute to their construction. How do these informal practices, in interaction with the formal practices, create the city? The analysis of the public policies of reconstruction and of the markets concerned with housing, land and property in the informal settlement areas in Phnom Penh reveals an urban production at the juncture of public policies, supervised practices and informal practices.

In the last decade, some original forms of collaboration between public authorities and low-income communities have been developed in Venezuela to improve access to drinking water in illegal settlements. These new forms of service co-production are progressively replacing informal practices in accessing water and, at the same time, changing the way residents appropriate their settlement. The paper, based on recent studies about these current forms of citizen participation in water provision as well as two case studies from the Caracas Southern periphery, aims to show how the move from informal practices in accessing water to existing forms of service co-production collaborate on the one hand in the re-composition of the settlement's space, and on the other, contribute to highlighting possible shortcomings in participatory democracy in Venezuela.

The informal urban sector seems on the face of it to point to an obvious reality: practices carried out on the fringe of regulations and opposed to a ‘modern' production of the city. More often than not urban studies about Algerian cities have merely observed the distortions existing between rules and practices, sometimes opposing the desired city and the actual city in an incantatory way, and denouncing the incapacity of the state to control an urban planning that breeds a plague of social curses. In fact, this production takes a contrary position and poses in a totally direct way the question of social legitimacy as opposed to institutional legitimity. We intend here to step out of the purely normative frame and examine these practices from the angle of their relationship with the social structure and the current urban dynamics. The point is to grasp the urban informal sector in its evolutions, expressions, spheres of activity, and the identity of its actors.

This paper discusses the concept of ‘authenticity' by looking at how it develops using social-regional mobilization surveys conducted in Larzac since the seventies as a basis. It is less concerned with intrinsic social data than with a socio-political construction aimed at promoting mobilization and increasing adhesion to a cause. The development of authenticity assumes that there is a mechanism of social-territorial appropriation and we discuss the principle orientations of this and the motivational topics that make Larzac an exemplary place.

The migration from cities to rural environments by individuals from certain urban groups has been increasing in France for the last thirty years. This represents deep changes taking place in our post-industrial societies. On the local level it produces not only new questions for communities but also reintroduces old questions that had been simplified by the earlier migration from rural to urban environments. After having identified this process, we will analyse two of its components and then their effects: first how, contrary to their initial expectations based on the present situation, the arrival of these new groups with their different priorities alters that situation by introducing unexpected conflicts into the community; second the impact of these conflicts on local politics and on the use of common space. The analysis of a village in the Pyrénées-Orientales in terms of the conflict between different factions and its effect on the population serves both as an illustration of one facet of this process and as the basis for looking at the ways the very approach to problems in these communities, neither really urban nor really rural, is changed as a result.

This article presents a geographical analysis of campaigns against a new airport project in the countryside of Toulouse during the decade from 2000. We mainly focus on key campaign actors, individual and collective, associations and elected representatives. This conflict is used to analyse demographic and social transformations in the rural areas concerned. If this movement has initiated new forms of proximity and sociability, strong local tensions nevertheless stay in place and this reveals the still unresolved difficulties of shared living in these peripheral rural areas of demographic uptake.