Contenu du sommaire : Illégalité et gouvernement des territoires

Illegality and the government of territories. Dealing with law and uses of law in the production, management and regulation of territoires This survey proposes a collective analysis about the State and the production of territoires starting from the issue of illegality and bypassing strategies. The territory is not only the product of deviant practices, a set of places where these deviant practices materialized and where we can observe them; the territory is also a forum where State and society are mutually constructed through illegality. The territory is notably the place where individuals interpret state actors'discourses upon which they adapt their behavior. They themselves represent this object called the State and they talk about their relationship to the State. Beyond the analysis of illegal practices or illegal situations in space, the survey opens the way for deliberation upon these practices and situations that tell us something about the prevalent norms and rules of the society. In other words it involves doing an “empirical exploration of the experience of the State” (Médard, 1991). This does not mean analyzing the State but its work and the relation the people have with it, to observe the conditions of production of the territoires and their regulatory mechanisms.

Governing through eviction? The example of “illegal camps” in Seine-Saint-Denis In recent years, public authorities have multiplied the number of evictions of illicit settlements in France. These operations are conducted without much result seeing as those evicted, mostly Romanian citizens designated, rightly or wrongly, as Roma, will settle just a bit further, and again illegally. Under these conditions, what is the use of continuing with these evictions? Initially the instruments of civil enforcement or administrative police, evictions now operate as the public policy regarding illicit settlements. However, the results are mixed in terms of land management. In the short term ineffective as they have not deterred the evicted families to abandon their practices; in the long term, provided they are followed by reallocation or sustainable securing measures on the squatted land, evictions should compel families to review their residential strategies, but without forcibly obliging them to leave the areas where they have settled.

Night fires of Edirnekapı. Territories of informal land-use and changes in urban regulatory processes in Istanbul Istanbul's ancient city walls are a territory of informal uses, in three domains: housing, economic activities and daily social practices. Despite calls for “clearance” and sporadic operations towards that end, these uses manage to survive, because of their regulatory role in economic, urban, social, psychological and symbolic terms. Practical compromises are built by the different agents, both users and authorities, to maintain these “valves” of urban life and general life in society – recognized as useful but not legitimate. À chronicle of the past fifteen years allows comparison of the remaining stabilities and resiliencies with certain changes in those processes induced by the recent urban renewal schemes

The Quilombo, the Church and the Law. Conflicts and arrangements around the interpretation of the law and the appropriation of a space of memory This paper aims to analyze the social and legal games that tend to emerge from a territorial conflict, which involve the recognition and creation, at the heart of the city of Rio de Janeiro, of an urban space associated with the memory of Afro-descendants. Approached as different forms of illegalism, the practices leading the actors involved in this legal and political fight give an idea of the economic and sociopolitical stakes inherent in the urban renewal schemes for the the city's harbor zone. From the claims for a memory space by a minority of inhabitants organized around the resistance against the current arguments of a neoliberal urban development based on cultural and patrimonial rhetoric, to the pressures and intimidations which run through all the harbor districts profound structural upheavals the Authors analyze informal games of powers, arrangements and social pressures, which tend to permeate the local sphere of powers and to influence the processes of urban government.

Regarding the consequences of storm Xynthia: little arrangements with illegal buildings Storm Xynthia has been an intense low pressure system hitting particularly the French coastline in March 2010 and causing both the death of fifty-three people and damages costing more than 2.5 billion of Euros. When confronted to such a natural disaster, usual insurance or national security mechanisms for taking responsibility have been activated. Moreover, French State decided to go further and, by way of risk prevention, decided to repurchase or expropriate more than a thousand houses. In doing this, some illegal situations had to be solved (constructions on public domain, lack of building permit...). The article examines the way the State, both central and local, decided to deny the existence of these situations concerning compensation procedures.