Contenu du sommaire : Usages populaires de l'espace

This article traces the evolution of stalls (échoppes) in the beginning of the 19th century in Paris. It attempts to understand what these apparently fragile buildings reveal about the popular uses of the street and what decided their disappearance. This work explores how, before Haussmann's works, popular commercial uses of the city were changed and how public space was viewed and produced as empty space furnished with monuments derived from everyday life and with movements of goods and customers.

In many south European cities, old working-class districts represent new strategic spaces. In Lisbon, thanks to the dynamic created by the organization of the 1998 universal exhibition, public and private authorities undertook the urban reconquest of Alcântara, an historical working-class suburb of the city. Behind the public efforts by these actors to show more respect for the industrial memory and the local social context, the reconquest of Alcântara has led to the production of renovated spaces the acces to which has become increasingly socially selective. This article presents the way in which two renovated spaces emblematic of this reconquest – the Docas and Alcântara Rio – are made use of by users from the lower classes, whether “already-there” residents of the district or not. The analysis of the frequentations, uses and temporalities of these two spaces suggests a continuity of behaviours by ordinary people and raises questions regarding their impact on the urban change of the old central districts.

Based on the case studies of two working-class and migrant neighbourhoods of Paris, the Bas-Belleville (10th-11th arrondissements) and Château-Rouge (18th), this paper shows the importance of working-class use of street and public space. This use is characterised by many people standing in the street where there is a concentration of cheap shops for immigrants. This concentration creates an urban centrality in which streets are a really sociable place for working-class people of all national origins. In the two neighbourhoods that were studied, this use of public space by immigrants tended to hide the on-going process of gentrification. If this process has been delayed and slowed down in these neighbourhoods compared with the rest of Paris, it nevertheless really does exist today, driven by the gentrifiers' will to appropriate public space. Therefore, working-class use of public space and gentrification are competing directly with each other. In Paris, the left-wing municipality tends to support the gentrifiers by a general policy of embellishment of the city and standardisation of manners in public space, at the expense of working-class practices.

Gathering, collecting or catching sea food on coastal and maritime areas by local people are little understood and poorly valued activities, other than by the groups concerned. Today, these areas are used by different social groupings. What then becomes of these activities? This paper analyses how a popular usage becomes established and then how it can be encroached upon by other social categories. It shows their distribution, reappropriation, transformation and legitimation by socially superior categories. In addition, these catches if they are made in fragile areas raise the question of resource management and the regulation of these activities. In the face of the specific framework for the overall management of these “natural” areas, new alliances appear among the different fishing groups. Their differences seem to be smoothed out, but are we not really observing the take-over of spaces and their arrangements by superior categories?

This article deals with the common uses of housing. Its results are based on an ethnographic inquiry undertaken in the great housing estate of Marzahn, East Berlin. It compares three households which share the same socio-professional status (they all depend largely on social benefits) but which have developed different housing patterns. This differentiation is linked to the social composition and geographic dispersion of the households' social networks. In that context, popular uses of housing are influenced by a strong sociability among neighbours belonging to the same enlarged family and they identify a social category characterized by a low cultural and social capital.

This paper seeks to identify the social role of Jamaican dancehalls in a context of multifaceted crisis. Drawing from the perspective of regular consumers, we examine the use of the dancehall space as a designated instrument for social therapy. The results of the empirical research that was conducted among participants in two popular events between 2006 and 2008 suggest that, by utilizing the specificity of dancehall culture, the consumers develop a hedonistic strategy which can temporarily relieve anxiety over existing social problems. The catharsis emerges as part of this strategy. Thus the dancehall space is perceived as an arena where the uncertainties of social reality are overcome. Confronted with the social, political and economic constraints of Jamaica, the dancehall consumers engage in a cathartic process through dancing. However, the dancehall remains a paradoxical space of cultural production, which tends to reproduce rather than challenge the rigid structures of Jamaican society.

The analysis shows that the gap between the social and the spatial has for some yeas been widening in outlying suburbs, a development not without consequences regarding the intensification of a polarisation within the city because the “middle classes” have settled there. A more detailed analysis of the social characteristics of the individuals settling into the outlying suburbs shows that if they are socially very mixed, their professional and social trajectory reveal similarities making them doubtful of their social position. Taking the opportunity of a favourable biographical situation, and mobilizing the residential model of the individual house, they are investing a lot, in a socially differentiated way, into the residential sphere to improve their social position. In this way making progress in residential terms becomes all the more necessary as the social identity of professional origin becomes less satisfactory.

The sentient body plays an important role in the appropriation of everyday life spaces. Our empirical study, focused on how personal territories are shaped, used and evaluated, gives insight into numerous dialogues between physical sensations and predispositions, between what is agreeable and what is beautiful. After shedding light on the specific issues (instrumental, hedonistic and formalistic) characteristic of the bodily appropriation of these environments (“ease”, “comfort” and “beauty”), it is then a matter of showing that the inhabited, constrained, even trained body is able not only to make things beautiful, as one could expect of an animal, but also to endow everyday spaces with a fully formalistic aesthetic.

From the perspective of the history of the social and human sciences, the aim of this article is to make the theory of “social space”as developed between the two world wars by Maurice Halbwachs better known. The work of this sociologist on “social time” and collective memory is now once again receiving attention within francophone research. Nevertheless his conceptualisation of “social space” consubstantial with his reflexions on “social time” remains little known. The study of the spatial dimension of social facts, such as initially presented by the author in Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), is nothing less than a heuristic approach linking together society, space, time and collective memory.

Based on a study (inecolito Deboudt coord. puca-medd, 2005-2008) carried out on the Opal Coast (in northern France) very rich in environmental amenities at the well-known seaside resort of Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, this article offers a reading of forms of ecological inequalities which are generated by the growing attraction of the seaside and the increasing awareness of ecological preoccupations. First through the way the residents of these sites define and qualify their natural and urban environment, second through the way in which they make use of its amenities, and, third, the legitimacy that they grant to themselves and to the other potential users (residents and tourists) to take advantage of the amenities, we show how the ecologization of societies (Kalaora, 2001) contributes to activate logics of social segregation legitimized by the necessity to regulate access to these coastal natural areas.