Contenu du sommaire : La ville en questions (1)

The urban crisis which started in the 1960s is the object of a large number of research works done by different disciplines. However the number of studies which deal with how social sciences interfere with and influence public policies are rather limited. We examine this problem while limiting itself to the implementation phase of an urban program. The analysis shows the dichotomy between conception and implementation which seriously impoverish action. It argues in favour of a theoretical work on the implementation process in order to establish a methodology linking action and conception.

This text gives an anthropological explanation of urbanism elaborated under three headings as town, city and commune. Here we limit ourselves to the material dimension ; the town is seen as writing or documentation ; as architecture and as something to be endured. The historical and comparative method justifies there views.

Compared to environmental and regional studies, urban geography was for a long time a rather neglected discipline, but nowadays it has taken on a more important role. The positions that geographers have held in urban planning and regional development attest that research in this urban field is expanding. Since the analysis of urban/rural relationships or networks, the main thematic focus has been on city centres, suburbanization, transportation, housing, population and urban society, and economy/urbanization. Studies have been conducted in third-world as well as in industrialised countries. But in a world where interrelationships between general and local levels are narrowing, concepts and methods of analysis need to be renewed.

The quartier or neighbourhood, which corresponds to an internal structure within a town, a space which has a meaning in terms of its inhabitants' daily lives, has generated interest within several disciplines. For a little over a century, approaches to the neighbourhood have involved various paradigms : socio-spatial objectivation ; a more subjective interpretation of a space as it is perceived, represented or experienced ; the concept of a territoriality as a mediator of social reality within a town. The methods of social town planning and development would do well to draw their inspiration from this epistemological evolution. However, through lack of conceptual reflection, policies and procedures implicitly give priority, in most cases, to a view of the neighbourhood as an object, a view which fails to take account of the way its inhabitants' patterns of life underpin its very existence.

The town is a social space by definition. To understand the reality of urbanism we must examine the relationship between social space and society as revealed by the contributions of diverse disciplines. Evidently the town, viewed either as object or as problem, can not be the exclusive property of any one discipline. To try to render this subject intelligible the approach must be pluridisciplinary which is justified by the interwoven nature of several factors : the political, the symbolic, the economic, the cultural and so therefore the social. The epistemological status of social space allows us to regard the relevant knowledge drawn from the social sciences and at the same time, to lay down certain conditions for a possible theory of the town. Present research in town studies bears witness to what one might call an «epistemological explosion ».

The author considers the question of «political science and the town » by examining each of the component themes critically not only for what it can reveal about itself but also for what it can reveal about the thematic relationships. This leads one to try to make clear the dimensions which in the long run condition the situation which exists at present : firstly, through a survey of the framework on context ; secondly, through recourse to metaphor and metonymy by the political sciences ; and, thirdly, through the processing of data regarding the practices of urban politicians, and urban social changes — issues that show the difficulty in identifying occurrences. The problematical character of the facts observed are linked by the author to a causality associated with the posture of political scientists who are called upon to reconsider their professional procedures and their social functions.

The modernization of local and urban government in Europe (Italy, France, Germany) depends in part on their political and territorial cultures. But despite these differences, the development of these cities has much in common. Spatial fragmentation and new conditions of cooperation are emerging in cities, although the need for the continued existence of «the municipality » is in no way threatened.

The town is the victim of a paradox : decentralization, eliminating its de facto specificity, has made it juridically a commune like any other. The agitation in the suburbs at the end of the 1980's led to a revision of the rights of the town which, in becoming rather the right to the town, has made possible the reappearance of the urban agglomeration in the texts, and has turned it into a national rather than a local factor. But with all that the concept of the town rests to be defined. Can urban rights serve (and are they sufficient) to provide a definition of the town ?

The administration, development and documentation of our urban heritage risks to become a witness to expediency giving us both monuments and town centres which will be but a system of simulacra or representations of the real thing. In certain respects the town is a place of cultural confrontation. The forces of degradation begin to contradict the defence of the cultural heritage when the latter persists in trying to assign a cultural identity which is too rigid.

We propose to explore the method used by Information and Communication Sciences in developing their model of local communication. Central to our critique is the concept of social representation. We think that the application of this notion could provide a bridge between the basic interests of ICS and the problem of local communication. The concept of social representation provides a transdisciplinary basis for better integrating the objective of ICS in developing a model of urban communication which is sensitive to local identity.

The phenomenon of communication via image in metropolises such as Bordeaux, Lyon, Montpellier or Rennes raises the anthropological question of «limit ». A new Utopian model of urban representation is developing through the intermediary of communication. What then becomes of the legendary and mythical dimensions of the places the urban imagination is fed on ? This text puts forward un analysis of contemporary indecisiveness concerning territorial and mental frontiers that is underlined by the phenomenon of communication between metropolises.

In 1991 an unprecedented step forward in France created the necessary conditions for a debate between research workers and those who make the decisions, and this at the same time as the law œncerned with trends in town development was being draughted. This article is concerned with the development and draughting of the law and its significance. We question in particular the specificity of this «step forward » when compared with what has happened in other countries where the distance between research and action would be traditionally less important or where different intellectual currents would have tended to affect the manner of approaching urban society.