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France, 17th March 2020, the public authorities urged the people to stay at home in a nationwide lockdown (confinement) in order to contain the spread of the Coronavirus. The redistribution of spatiality, which is restricted to the walls of their home throughout the public health crisis, gives rise to epistemological questions.How can geographers take part in the scientific debates to analyze the social, cultural, spatial and territorial consequences of this pandemic ? This article undertakes an analysis of the input of an “inner geography” that is defined as a socio-anthropology of the concept of inhabiting. The accounts of the lockdown experience, relayed in a viral way by the social network, exemplify the essence of the spatial inequity as regards people's succeeding or not in creating their own cosmogonical tales behind closed doors. In other words, at a time when everyone is somehow working on domesticating their “inhabiting/dwelling apparatuses/machines” that is to say they own accommodation, the fact of confining/shutting geography away would consist in developing some micro-geopolitics whose purpose would be to identify the causes of this spatial inequity. These factors are sometimes staged through improper dialectics in order not only to fight but also to put an end to the myth of modernity based on the estrangement of Man with his Environment.

A key policy issue in large African cities is the nature and consequences of the urban policies that favour and ensure the integration of the populations of informal settlements. Choices have been made between formal land subdivision and restructuration depending on political and economic regimes. In Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, massive planned housing policies were the instrument chosen by the authorities under the Sankarist revolutionary regime (1983-1987). The aim was to reduce urban inequalities and provide city access for the greatest number of people. However, these policies have effectively transformed these districts into areas of land conquest and speculation, placing them at the heart of the process of land commodification. Since the 1990s, the pursuit of the planned housing policy, in the context of decentralization and neo-liberal policies, has increased inequalities and caused social tensions leading to its suspension in 2011. With it came a period of uncertainty, marked by growth of the population in unplanned neighbourhoods, socio-economic diversification and the development of local initiatives. Political responses, linked to projects financed by international aid, resulted in the restructuring of these neighbourhoods in situ (road development, basic urban services) with a limited impact. The 2014 democractic turning point constitutes a break with the fragmentation of public action and the involvement of a diversity of actors, such as a more visible civil society, but also private property developers. In view of these changes, the authorities, confronted with the tensions generated by the divergent expectations and interests of the actors involved, are struggling to develop a policy that both contributes to the sustainable urban integration of the inhabitants of informal settlements and that also limits their expansion.

For forty years, the French government has developed a legal arsenal and several strategies concerning coastal risks management. Nevertheless, their enforcement at local level remains an issue. A gap between the positions of the French government and local authorities is observed and is indicative of the difficulty encountered for enforcement of this policy. This paper proposes an explanation for these difficulties, based on our the Authors'analysis of scales of operation and decentralization heritage.

In 1998 there appeared an article by Marc Cote, a French geographer : « les oasis malades de trop d'eau ». It pointed to excess water resulting from excessive irrigation and inappropriate practices which aggravate the situation by poor management. The situation has hardly improved in more than 20 years. Worse still, the palm grove is deteriorating because of what was supposed to be a development factor : water. The paper reviews the logic underlying the current management approaches by seeking to explain the reasons for such malfunctions.