Contenu du sommaire : La ville dans tous les sens

In towns, identities, cultures, social links are confrontated to each other. Therefore, urban communication is a polyphony expressed in conflictual forms of political languages and in integrative forms of cultural mediation. That semiotic system is present in a political geography of places of communication with æsthetical and cultural identities. The paper pays also attention to silences and breakings of urban communication.

For several years Paris has been the arena for certain « popular and convivial » events based on the idea of granting access to places previously closed or forbidden to the public, as well as diverting them from their primary function, such as Paris Plage, Nuits Blanches, Fête de la Musique and so on. These urban festivals offer the ethnologist an exceptional terrain to observe the mechanisms of production of the modern city. The classically ritual character of these types of events is evident from the publicity and scenographic devices they employ, as well as their repetition and codification. But their symbolic function also stems from the discrepancy between, or inversion of, the place and the utilisation commonly associated with it. Thus, the logic of performance seems to become central. As if a new system of the presence of the city - Paris in particular and the city in general - was emerging.

The fast urbanization of today's world is a planetary challenge. This challenge is part of globalisation i.e in the historical process in which people increase the material or immaterial exchange at the scale of the planet. New technologies, which is the base of these immaterial exchanges, modify our comprehension of time. Time and space, the near and the far, the outside and the inside, all mix together. Linked to the use of objects of communication, new behaviours appear one is admits unknown people. But also, new ritualiazed types of meeting. Privacy becomes public. On one hand a « Big Brother » type of society, which permits a visibility of each of us by all. On the other hand, we see a development of generalized festivity activities. We must analyzed, based on urban art, the behaviour of the individual, in an environment which has become mediatise.

Fluid architectural spaces refer to approaches based on the raising of the value of materials, the redefinition of the parameters of the experiments and the renewal of the tools of conception. These approaches are open to innovative plastic dynamics. The architectural buildings motivate new approaches based on the relationship between the movement and the place. At an architectural and urban scale, these buildings give you a sense of perspective and feeling. This interplay implies a permanent relationship between our movement and the locale by encouraging and stimulating new social experiences thus creating new ways of living and feeling the space.

The author explains how two institutions, two official bodies, namely the City of Le Havre and UNESCO, have generated messages to the people of Le Havre for the former, to the « world at large » for the latter and how both of them have implemented reconstruction processes of representation of the city. These two discourses corresponding to two levels of recognition, analogy and expertise, have combined effectively to alter the way the city of Le Havre is now perceived.

In order to prevent urban conflicts and trouble in outer suburbs, political and social urban policies have been implemented. What was at stake in successive political projects (rejuvenation of social housing and improvement of residents' local environment) was to give an impulse to citizenship and courtesy as well as mixed social relationship. The violent urban local conflicts of the 90's have shown the limit to such policies. Consequently, a new direction is been taken; it relies on the economic vector to stop the isolation and facilitate the integration of sensitive urban areas. This policy of urban rejuvenation has established mediation institutionally as a means of social regulation. As citizen initiative, mediation was integrated by governmental urban policy as a promise of social peace-building. Mediation implemented along different lines can be given different forms: pacification, social and racial integration and the creation of social interaction. The first observations of local practices in mediation have proved its social use.

Internet appears as an ubiquitous way of access to the resources traditionally offered by the city. As the city, Internet fosters social interaction and gives access to a wide variety of informations and services. Its large social and spatial diffusion could give credence to the thesis of the death of city which resources would now be accessible from anywhere and to the idea of vanishing disparities of urban areas thanks to an equal access for the different social groups to the resources of informations society. This article seeks to assess how the uneven access to the Internet, the wide diversity of Internet uses as well as the practices of the telecommunication networks' operators tend to reinforce the splintering of the city into socially specialized areas.

The districts of the town centres, which are on the way to gentrification, characterized by movement, communication and racial mixture, contrast significantly with the shanty towns where recently urbanized populations stick together and settle down, left on their own in an unorganized urbanity on the fringe of the institutional city. Because of their uncontrollable growth and their precariousness, and thus more vulnerable to mafia and group building, they constitute, despite their inventiveness, one of the major issues of our time. An urban inquiry made on the Chabolas, the shanty towns of Madrid, enables to measure their extent. We will combine the description of this micro society with the knowledge gathered, by resetting it in a more global anthropological project of analysis of the world's civilization, woven by the communication networks from which shanty town populations are excluded.

This article deals with urban billsticking through the study of a peculiar passage-way (the Passage St Remi in Bordeaux) which is characterized by an overlap of institutional signs and illegal billsticking. From a theoretical point of view, the approach is based on the semiotics of the object and more specifically on the tensivity between legible and visible. This starting point, which favourize the phenomenological body and helps us to understand the articulation of a specific manipulation between the objects, makes it possible to move and to double the perceptive postulate with the instinct one (the psychoanalytic “pousse-à-voir”). Thus, urban billsticking would be a quest with no suspension possible, no stop for what is beyond the visible, and would keep a glance that would not see anything going.

Following the development of communication and information technologies, the growth of the company must hold account of the variables not only internal, but increasingly external. The study relates to 140 Cameronian TPE belonging to various branches of economic activities. The results of this research indicate that the level of studies of the leader as its aspirations do not have any impact on the development of the company.

The aim of this article is to present the methodological choices made in order to analyse the quality of verbal interactions in situations between actors. The methodological design we proposed aims to avoid the common criticism made of conversational analysis research concerning the absence of the organisation within its analysis.

“On Location” was an experience that was carried out in thirteen cities in France over a period of three years (2002 à 2005). It consisted in matching the mayor, or an elected official, with an artist so that they could explore the city on foot for an entire day and give free rein to their imaginations. The goal of this experience of shared emotions and brain storming is to envisage possible urban projects.