Contenu du sommaire : Osaka 1868-1945 : modernités japonaises - Usages politiques de la rue

In the first half of the 20th century, Ōsaka became the economic and industrial heart of the Japanese empire. This expansion coincided with strong growth of its port activities. These activities relied on flexible labour by dockers provided by specialised companies. These highly-structured docking labour agencies met the needs of the capitalist economy of major industrial groups experiencing strong growth. They also perpetuated a labour market organisation based on day labourers which traced its origins back to the Tokugawa period. This mixture of archaic and modern labour methods in the port of Ōsaka triggered certain social problems that the authorities eventually addressed in the 1920s, such as labourers forced to work by these agents, as well as proven connections between these agents and organised crime.

Historians have often emphasised the continued existence, in 20th century Japanese cities, of neighbourhood associations that were apparently the legacy of the chō (street and neighbourhood communities that organised the lives of urban commons in the Edo period). A review of the situation in Ōsaka in the Meiji period suggests that this view must be amended even though the local situation may have been different than in the rest of the country. Indeed, we note that the social and administrative reforms of the new regime, by redrawing the territorial network of the city, and by setting up new decision-making bodies, undermined the ancient communities' capacity to place restrictions on the lives of inhabitants, as well as the various arrangements that ensured their cohesion. Yet the fading influence of the chō was gradual, and the persistence of forms of sociability amongst the inhabitants of a single spatial area who were active in the institutions created by the political authorities or in local political life, is clear in the emergence of a new urban society.

Urban history in modern Japan – i.e. from the Meiji period until the Second World War – has mainly focused on the changes in institutions and policies. Only recently have researchers focused their interest on urban societies. The special Ōsaka dossier in Histoire urbaine gives an overview of the most recent research on the metropolis of the Kansai region, inspired by methods that have already been applied to the historiography of cities of the Edo period. This research sheds light on how this city's society lived through the transition from the traditional society of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the era of capitalism and the triumphant modern state of the 20th century: in terms of changes in neighbourhood institutions and their ties with local politics until the Interwar period, or the exploitation of poor labourers in all business sectors, this era saw the appearance of certain issues that continue to affect Ōsaka's urban society.

In 1905-06, the first modern revolution in the contemporary history of Iran resulted in the establishment of parliamentary democracy in the country. Months of uprising and protest forced the government to surrender to the protesters' demands and agree to the foundation of the first parliament. In Tehran, the capital, people's major protest sites were the courtyards of two mosques, a holy shrine, and the British embassy garden. Similarly, in other big cities around the country, people mostly used mosques and holy shrines as their primary protest sites. This paper demonstrates that the Constitutional Revolution was largely a street-less social movement during which people primarily depended on their sacred spaces as protest sites. The paper investigates the reasons for people's spatial choices by analysing Iranian urban society in the 19th and early 20th century and examining the common repertoires of contention in pre-modern Iran. It suggests that there is a close relationship between the configuration of urban society and the production of political public spaces in turn-of-the-century Iran. By including a non-Western narrative of political public spaces, this essay adds a vital set of examples to the body of knowledge on spatial theories of social movements and public spaces, which tend to be dominated by European and North American perspectives.

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 brought ethnic, cultural and political identities into conflict on the battlefields of Europe, but on the city streets of New York and Buenos Aires, despite the neutrality of the United States and Argentina, the effects of the war were as keenly felt. Through the examination of the parades, protests and displays that took place on the city streets of Buenos Aires and New York during 1914 to 1917, this paper places the 'street scene' as the vital means of assessing the effect of the war beyond the confining notions of combatant and neutral states. It furthers the scholarship of the urban environment as a theatre of war by examining two cities whose similarities in the diversity of population but differences in political authority make them ideal cases for assessing the far-reaching impact of the conflict. The expression, control and representation of identities within these metropolises demonstrates that whilst the actual fighting was elsewhere the war was still fought on the streets of Buenos Aires and New York.

Our contribution offers an investigation of the regulation of street politics in Western Europe in the interwar years based on a case study of Great Britain and the Netherlands. These countries faced similar challenges with mass movements emerging on extreme left and right that often took to the streets and the rise of a self-conscious and influential (mainstream) socialist movement. Public space turned into the scene for an increasing competition between political groups that aimed to present themselves as the most vital, dynamic, diverse, disciplined and successful movements of the country. In response to it, national and local governments regulated the use of the streets for political purposes, for instance by clamping down on the use of uniforms and other political symbols or by prohibiting marches in specific parts of the city. These regulations triggered a debate about the tension between protecting public order and protecting constitutional rights like free speech and the freedom of association. In essence, street politics went hand in hand with a debate about democracy and the domain of politics. In our contribution, we first of all aim to show the impact of different political cultures on the regulation of street politics. In Britain, a confrontational approach formed an essential element of a masculine political culture with politicians who were expected to be able to deal with 'heckling', to tame the rumbustious crowd. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, street politics was contained and perceived as a threat to parliamentary democracy. Secondly, we discuss the ambivalence among social democrats with regard to the regulation of street politics. They tended to be in favour of clamping down on political extremists, but also feared that it might backfire and affect their own public manifestations. Thirdly, we show that regulations were hardly ever very specific. In essence, thus, the limits of street politics were decided in court. Fourth and finally, we show that towards the end of the 1930s street politics of political extremists was pushed to the margins of the city and beyond, far removed from the centers of power.

Since at least the 1850s, the streets of Buenos Aires have served as a complementary space for voters' involvement, which was considered valid under certain circumstances. However, the right of assembly was not defined in constitutional and legislative terms until 1949. In 1932, a Police Order on public meetings, driven by Agustín P. Justo's government, tried to define and prescribe the rules of the political game in the streets of Buenos Aires. The article analyses this regulation on the right of assembly – inspired by European jurists – into the national and international context of the democracy crisis in the 1930s. The Argentinian case shows an original local variation of the difficulties that liberal democracies had to face during the Interwar period. Despite the fact that some terms of Argentinian politics were very similar to European ones, conflicts also took place in the context of a specific political culture in which the problem of representation was set from a different perspective.

The first regional plan of Paris (PARP) is charged by the French national government in 1934. In order to limit the rapid growth of Paris, it proposed a detailed zoning plan. However, the public enquiry conducted in 1935 revealed a strong local opposition and the zoning plan was specifically contested by local actors and municipalities. The subsequent negotiations between the State services and municipalities led to important changes in the definitive version of the PARP, passed in 1939. This paper intends to examine the zoning techniques of the regional plan of Paris, focusing on the analysis of its evolutions between the first and the final version. It aims to comprehend to what extent local opposition to PARP's zoning plan. led to a higher local involvement in the State's regional plan.