Contenu du sommaire : Droit à la ville au Sud et construction des légitimités ordinaires

Societal as well as scientific debates have recently been strongly reactivated around the Right to the city. The notion resonates in a specific way in cities of the South, albeit in a very diverse way from city to city. It relates there to the maintaining of a Right to be and to remain in the city, or to the accessing of the city and its resources. In the wake of these contemporary uses of the notion, this thematic issue aims to question the Right to the city in cities of the South by insisting on the legitimacy-building processes that inform and translate into action and in a flexible way the notion of the Right to the city. To do this, the thematic issue focusses on the ordinary practices and daily experiences of urban dwellers who mobilize various tactics and spatialized practices throughout the more mundane times and spaces of their everyday lives in the city. In all the proposed contributions, the emphasis lies less on urban struggles and conflicts than in the questioning of the plurality of ways of taking place in the city as well as in the elaboration of strategies of legitimization based on the use of places, on the reappropriation of the city, or on the practice of everyday life (“Arts de faire”).

The contribution focuses on the experiences and practices concerning the claim for the right to the city by populations from slums installed in the resettlement sites on the outskirts of Rabat. In particular, it examines how everyday legitimacy is constructed in these huge, poorly equipped residential schemes, physically and symbolically « out of town, » embodying a new « marginality » for these disadvantaged populations. Beyond the social protest actions that express people's claims to dignified housing or to the right to the city (transportation, facilities, security, employment, etc.), it is mainly their daily practices that the Authors seek to analyse and explore. The study highlights the strategy they mobilize (social solidarity in the management of neighborhoods and maintenance of public spaces, the creation of basic facilities, provision of systems for mobility towards the central city, the use of informal means etc.) to adapt to this new specific context. A series of observations and interviews has been conducted with a test sample of populations transferred from the capital and its adjacent territories to two large resettlement schemes in its urban margins (new town of Tamesna and the Ain Aouda Urban Centre). Based on this, the Authors plan to study the way in which the right to the city in these peripheral spaces is constructed and justified, as well as the forms of reactivation or reinvention of resistance practices already at work previously in their slums.

This paper aims to understand how various forms of urban citizenship emerged under the current semi-authoritarian system of Algeria. To illustrate this purpose, the Authors deliberately chose to present citizen legitimacy construction from different individual and collective histories, in a middle-sized city in eastern Algeria (the city of Batna). The Informal neighborhoods were selected for their occupants'dynamic approach and ability to mobilize and to improve their daily lives. The Authors particularly focused on analysing the passage from local claims to the construction of real legitimacy and thus to the recognition of these occupants as full citizens within the city (in spite of the unplanned character of their living areas and sites).How do these occupants in their informal settlements develop the capacity for organization and mobilization to build their own legitimacy ? How do they interact with the political spheres ?

Drawing on the theories of recognition (Honneth, 2000) and on the debate on “quiet encroachment” by A Bayat (1997), this article analyses how 16 Indian families specialising in the sale of produce negotiated, over 3 generations, their right to work on Grand Parade, a public square highly symbolic of Cape Town's city-centre. Caught up in the tensions of public action that oscillated between the need to supply the city and the need to showcase and plan the city-centre since the 1910s, they resisted the tightening of racial zoning under apartheid and even achieved the status of small local institution. Their short history raises the issueof the citizenship of (relatively well-off) working classes and small entrepreneurs in the segregationist apartheid and colonial urban societies of Cape Town. The municipal archives make it possible to record the daily exchanges between these traders and municipal officials. In this administrative space of interface that records ordinary encounters with the State, we can observe forms of quiet encroachment (Bayat, 1997), oriented towards the daily and concrete reproduction of their economic activity, as well as forms of political mobilization representing a quest for forms of political and social recognition (Honneth, 2000). By engaging in such a dialogue between Asaf Bayat's socio-geographic analysis and Axel Honneth's political and moral philosophy, and using a very limited case study, it is possible to analyse how the political demand for recognition is concretely anchored in a set of practical daily interactions with the local Cape Town bureaucracy.

In Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), the tea grins constitute temporary, but regular collective occupations of urban public space. These « in-between spaces » consist in the meeting of mostly young men at different times, drinking tea and talking. They gather at unoccupied spaces that offer them tranquility and relative comfort. Such spatial devices constitute spaces of sociability where the hierarchies that usually structure social relationships are blurred. Both shelter and source-of strength, spaces which allow exchange of services and strategies for resourcefulness. They participate in and at the same time testify to the development of the codes of urban youth. Although grins are not necessarily regarded as political places by their users, the political register is present in the names young people choose for them, in the values ​​mobilized around them and the practice they represent (a collective occupation of the street, which could establish a space for allowing free speech). In this, grins are heterotopias that exist in parallel with isotopia (« accomplished and rationalized spatial order of capitalism and the state », but do not constitute an alternative to it. This article deals with the status of grins in the mechanisms of development of public speech, and collective action. Grins can be considered as « arenas » where public problems are formulated through collective discussion, but do not appear as a legitimate forum for political debate. Therefore, the grin represents an illicit arena where a « subaltern citadinity » is mainly built. This article consequently studies the processes of political subjectivation that are linked to the practices specific to the urban spatial context, but do not necessarily appear in the public space for discourse. Citadinity is therefore examined from its character as the result of certain processes, with the city space allowing individuals to develop into political subjects. The Authors therefore examine the existence of a political speech continuum, the public expression of which would depend on the possibilities for negotiation with the social order, and on the balances of power that produce it. Thus a subordinate practicas use of space would be articulated with more officially frameworked forms of claiming for rights, in a back and forth process between hidden transcript and public transcript, as described by J. C. Scott (2008). Finally, the article discusses whether or not use of space for infrapolitical practices by the subaltern brings support to the construction of collective actions around these issues.

This paper deals with the ways stigmatised groups living in different capital cities of countries of the South resort to various forms of invisibility in public spaces. Such groups are either migrants, ethnic and internal ones as well as foreigners, racialised minorities or prostitutes. The main local political contexts are characterized by domination processes such as authoritarianism, or social and spatial marginalization based on stigmas. In such contexts in which it is often too painful or even dangerous to criticize injustices, subaltern and subordinated people can use invisibility as a strategy embedded in their everyday life as a way to consolidate their presence in the city and to integrate the city life by behaving like legitimate city dwellers. These people do not mobilize politically speaking nor protest as a group as a whole. They do not try to overcome the stigma but they develop strategies based on anonymization and normalization in order to be seen as ordinary urban dwellers. These strategies can be observed in spatial practices such as routines or daily urban experiences. The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the forms of these invisibility strategies in urban spaces at different levels and at different moments of the day, of the week, of the year, taking temporality into account. The Authors argue that these groups can accede to quiet ways of being urban dwellers despite their very vulnerability. Moreover invisibility strategies are the only way to assert their place in the urban places and to accede to legitimacy in the eyes of the other urban dwellers. From this perspective the right to the city is considered neither as a normative nor a reclamatory process but as a right to discretion, to be there and to live in the city as anyone else. The Authors use field-based analyses conducted under qualitative methods such as interviews and observations in three cities, Mexico City (Mexico), Maputo (Mozambique) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). By doing this they seek to make theoretical and empirical connections between Latin-American and African contexts which are often separated in the academic literature.

The question of the « right to the city » in the South is more acute for countries in the process of rapid urbanization, such as China or India. These new urban spaces are the subject of mega-projects that reshape and extend traditional urban landscape challenging the right to the city of present residents, causing the displacement of the most disadvantaged. However, there are situations where the right to the city is granted, as in Amaravati, the new capital of Andhra Pradesh in South India. Over the entire project area (200 km²), in 2015 the villagers were plunged abruptly into the urban world by decisions of the Andhra Pradesh government. However, have they all acquired a full unrestricted right to the city as defined by H. Lefebvre ? A preliminary response comes from the urban model and its implementation, that of the inclusive city chosen by the authorities. What is the scope of the right granted and who is able to grasp hold of it ? The Authors'fieldwork has shown that the government of Andhra Pradesh grants some rights in the city unequally. It does not allow a complete “right to the city.” Only landowners can take advantage of the speculative model planned for Amaravati. This situation of the creation of a city from scratch shows that the right to the city remains a collective conquest subjected to the ambitions of competing social groups.