Contenu du sommaire : Les espaces de l'entre-soi

Do not trespass
Are today's cities mere aggregates of discrete enclaves? Up to what point can the upper classes enforce a form of exclusive socialization? This article adopts an ethnographic perspective to explore the production of spaces of exclusive socialization on the basis of an extreme case: the use of security protocols in new private real estate developments in Buenos Aires. The paper shows that these protocols not only delineate territorial boundaries defined by an upstream logic of segregation, as the studies of gated communities suggest: they are also used within these “closed” spaces to create boundaries between their inhabitants, who come from different backgrounds, and, chiefly, between the inhabitants and their employees. Rather than a hard fact, in-group sociability is a category of social action that makes distinctions and categorizations in situations of interdependency.

“Caen's Neuilly” during its electoral campaign
This paper analyzes the unfolding of the 2008 municipal election in a wealthy suburban community. Conducted in the “heat of the moment,” the survey seeks first to outline the different fractions of the middle and upper classes locally represented, as well as their expectations in terms of the strategies of urban development. It then considers the electoral offer and emphasizes the way in which these different strategies have been presented as the key issue of the election. Oscillating between the explicit demand for “social and intergenerational diversity” and the determination to safeguard the “rural and residential habitat,” the question of in-group sociability is key to electoral mobilizations. Yet, the results of the election suggest that the vision of suburban spaces as the main theater of social and urban secession must be relativized.

A settlement above suspicion ?
In the 1980s, suburban spaces became the destination of many lower middle class households becoming property owners. If these spaces are often opposed to “social habitat” neighborhoods, the local policies associated with them are little understood. Based on the case of a suburban community, this article traces the logics that have led local elected officials to privilege a single-family home type of urbanization. It then focuses on the different forms of control exercised over the settlement, some of which are institutionalized while others are more informal. The refusal of project housing and the support brought to local socialization networks then translate into the rejection of social categories that remain stigmatized because they are associated with racialized or pauperized groups. As a result, these practices lead to the emergence of a residential form of in-group sociality shared by many white lower middle class households seeking social status.

Negotiating diversity
This article focuses on the policy of integration of new residents in the mitzpim, the small residential villages of Galilee.In these villages, inhabitants elect an admission committee that exercises a veto right over the integration of new residents. The mitzpim have emerged at the end of the 1970s, in the framework of the policy of Judaization, and up to this day, their admission committees have always refused Arab applications. However, despite this fact, admission committees represent spaces of struggle within which the cooptation of the same coexists more and more often with the valorization of social diversity. In family, religious or even ethnic matters, recently settled residents claim a change of policy. When these change prone actors prevail, the social engineering that admission committees enable can be placed at the serve of a controlled diversity.

Homophily without community
This article is based on fieldwork conducted in three new neighborhoods of Courbevoie and Levallois-Perret (Hauts-de-Seine, west of Paris), which are located near the business district of La Défense, and where corporate professionals and managers are overrepresented among the residents. These areas have been transformed by the process of new-build gentrification that regularly contributes to enlarging the historic western axis of Paris' upper-class neighborhoods. The paper analyzes successively the causes and motivations of the inhabitants' residential choices, the weak local sociability associated with this specific type of urban self-segregation, and the key role played by the drawing of socioeconomic symbolic boundaries among the uppermiddle classes. Indeed, homophilic aggregation in the refounded neighborhoods follows a logic largely different and autonomous from the (complementary) one – based on radical alterization and stigmatization – that motivates the avoidance of the working class.

Dispersing households
With the establishment of the Agence nationale pour la rénovation urbaine (ANRU) in 2003, demolition has become a systematic and legitimate policy instrument used to intervene in low income neighborhoods previously managed through urban policies (politique de la ville). Yet, available studies of demolition decision have paid little attention to the processes and practices of relocation that are part and parcel of these policies. As a result, they cannot explore the ways in which the collective forms of family-based and residential coexistence are mobilized, renegotiated and imposed during and after such operations. Based on fieldwork done at the relocation service of an important housing project leaser of the suburbs of Paris, this paper focuses on the way in which the territorial dispersion of projects-based households triggered by renovation programs impacts the geographies and the practices of in-group socialization of the relocated groups. It thus seeks to highlight the contribution of the observation of institutional and family practices associated with relocation for the understanding of the social impact of demolition policies.

“Parité” under supervision
While the legal rules seeking to establish gender equality within political assemblies are multiplying and increasingly constraining, and are by now extended to other social spaces, they have failed to counteract the masculine leadership on the political microcosm. This paper interrogates the ambivalent effects of gender equality laws. Surveys conducted in 2001 and 2014 show that professional politicians, while declaring themselves to be fully supportive of gender equality, manage to control the selection and the circulation of elected officials. Playing the rules allows for a supervised entry of women into politics, while the highlighting of a few symbols conceals the frailty of the professionalization process of most politician women. The backstage as well as the real power sites of the political space remain exclusive spaces and the symbolic staging of the political field contributes to maintaining the status quo of masculine domination. Gender equality is used in a way that is functional to the reproduction of a gender order that differentiates between and hierarchizes gender hierarchies, thus facilitating the preservation of in-group sociability.