Contenu du sommaire : Sports sur la ville

Reflecting the place of sports in the city, the topography of Parisian sports facilities tracks the changes in sports practices and in the city itself. Three centuries of history have shown that a certain degree of proximity encourages regular practice of a sport unless it requires space or special technical conditions. During the Belle Époque, contrasting social practices created spatial segregation for which the World's Fair provided the framework. From the late 19th century to the late 20th century, sports followed the phases of a city undergoing mutations, sometimes connected with the business world, sometimes linked to the development of hygienic town planning, sometimes pushed to the outskirts of an ever-denser city. Lastly, it was reincorporated into the heart of the city during the restructuring of the 1970s-2000s. The current diversity of sporting practices – participatory or spectator sports, and individual or team sports – corresponds to sports venues that are either centrally located or on the outskirts, in parallel with the distances made possible by the broadcasting of sports matches on screens.

Between 1900 and 1920, London and Paris were the main cities on the European professional boxing circuit. Engaged around a mass spectacle (boxing attracted many spectators), these two capitals multiplied relations and exchanges. This article attempts to analyse how these cities, beyond their rivalry, formed a bicephalic capital for the European market for pugilistic shows. It shows firstly that boxing, while born in England, immediately became transnational. Then, the article studies how this English activity, by setting up in Paris, was subject to various appropriations and created its own mode of organisation. It then appeared that competition was not the only modality of relations between these capitals. Their relationships were also structured around exchanges, loans, collaborations and agreements: gradually, one could not be envisaged without the other, and the two represented the heart of the European market.

Olympic stadiums located on the outskirts of Paris and Los Angeles, built for the 1924 and 1932 Olympic Games, respectively, are still being operated today and will host events in the 2024 and 2028 Games. Creating during a period of urban development and expanding sports practices and spectacles, these stadiums have, since the Interwar period, had a complex relationship with their urban surroundings. Sometimes actually belonging to the municipality, they are simultaneously landmarks for their respective cities, a potential means for developing an area and a source of major disruptions due to the frequent flux of sporting event spectators. In a comparative perspective, this paper endeavours to shed light on the relationship between a city and a major international sports venue.

As a case study of the development of modern sports in Lourenço Marques (the name given to the capital of Mozambique under the Portuguese colonial empire), this paper endeavours to cast light on the ties between the acquisition of social skills through cultural consumption of sports as a modern spectacle (in this case, football), and the development of the urban integration process. In the case of Lourenço Marques, this relationship occurred in specific circumstances of extreme social segregation at a time when sports was a practical and symbolic way of strengthening this inequality. However, changes in sports, along with the political and economic structure during the final phase of Portuguese administration, show how football, as a common social language, produced specific forms of citizenship in an urban setting.

By relying mainly on archives produced by the sports movement, football historians have neglected autonomous practices that develop outside of clubs. Thanks to the analysis of archives from the public administration, this article sheds light on practices whose analysis relates to the legitimate uses of urban space and reveals social issues different from those of established sport: alongside an official sport dominated by men, autonomous football is marked by a much higher proportional presence of women, who play a role of authority in the sports socialisation of young people.

Recent syntheses about urban Byzantine houses are rare, as they must use very diverse sources documenting a long period. This paper outlines such a study of the aristocratic house, based on a few significant examples: they show that the more we progress in the chronology, the more we ascend the social hierarchy of elites, a fact which reveals a more restricted access to the luxury house. Concerning a house's formal characters, however, we note continuities. The term triclinos refers to reception halls designed for the ostentation of the house's master, as shown showed by the continued use of apses. Such a continuity also concerns the central courtyards and porticoes, as gardens and aquatic refinements. Finally, mosaics and statues maintain decoration inspired by pagan Antiquity, not at all contradicted by the development of Christian chapels.

Teplitz was a well-known spa town at the border between North Bohemia and Saxony. It was also part of the seigniorial estates of the Clary-Aldringen, a noble family that had been promoted to Princely House in 1767. This study aims at highlighting the issues of princely action during the growth of medical and touristic spa towns in Central Europe. Johann von Clary (1753-1826) built a spa and hotel establishment in the 1790s: the Herrenhaus. He was then able to offer princely accommodation to the nobility often marked by the upheavals of the revolutionary decade. The seigniorial and family archives allow us to examine the neo-classical ambivalence between the magnificence of the princely heritage and the development of European standards of thermal architecture. The design of the Herrenhaus and its social and medical uses shed light on urban renewal between 1793 and the heyday of romantic baths in the 19th century.