Contenu du sommaire : Fos - Étang de Berre. Un littoral au cœur des enjeux environnementaux

No other Mediterranean area has been marked for so long by environmental conflicts as the coastal strip between Fos‑sur‑Mer and the banks of the Etang‑de-Berre. Regular individual and collective demonstrations have taken place for more than two hundred years, some violent, structured and recurring, others less so, to draw the attention of the public authorities to the risks and nuisances from the industrial boom. The purpose of this article is to intersect the sociological and historical perspectives with a triple goal: 1. understand better the efforts made by host societies to withstand successive, diverse and dense industrial pollution; 2. identify the various characteristics of a long-term and frequently unequal balance of power; 3. attempt to highlight common features and changes in how this type of conflict is conducted. It relates the story of a dispossession and the several ways in which it occurred, often violently: appropriation of communal spaces, setting up barriers or bans around industrial facilities or capturing and degrading local environmental resources and assets. It highlights symmetrically the resistance of affected populations in protesting and demanding more salubrious living conditions or their rights to access and use the land snatched from them.

Port Authorities and Oil Pollution from the Étang de Berre to the Gulf of Fos (1945‑1979). In the wake of World War II, the development of oil activities compounded the environmental issues of the Étang de Berre/Gulf of Fos area. Ballast water discharges by tankers and accidental spills from refineries increased, as the crude oil imports significantly grew. The Chamber of Commerce and, from 1966 onwards, the Port Autonome de Marseille, which managed all port facilities from the Joliette basin to the docks of Fos, did not overlook these risks. Since they wanted to support the regional petroleum industry against criticisms, they took anti-pollution measures to prevent environmental disasters. Based on primary source materials, this article draws up an inventory of marine contamination, then compares both port authorities' actions in order to study their evolutions, impacts and limits.

The creation of the Permanent Secretariat for the problems of industrial pollution Fos/étang-de-Berre. Environmental shift or optimization of an industrial ambition (1971-1985) ? The industrial and port history of the Gulf of Fos-sur-Mer, the third site of the Port of Marseille, whose construction began in 1965 thanks to the joint efforts of local and State economic circles, is well known, even if debates still remain on the role of certain actors and the economic scope of the operation. There are also occasional insights into the resistance caused by the emergence of what the Survival and Living movement calls the « Fos monster ». On the other hand, we are less informed about the policy that was then inaugurated by the State because of the strong and foreseeable increase in industrial pollution around Fos/étang-de-Berre. However, it was on this occasion that the Permanent Secretariat for Industrial Pollution Problems (S3PI) was created in 1971, an experimental structure which, from 1977 and especially during the 1990s, spread to several French regions. If, at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Paris region was for the French State the laboratory for regulating industrial pollution, at the turn of the 1970s it was the territory of Fos/étang-de-Berre which acted as a field of experimentation for a new approach to these issues. In this contribution, we wanted to look back at the first fifteen years of the S3PI through a number of questions : what are the missions of the new organization? What resources does it have at its disposal? Who are its main actors? How does it define pollution standards? How are relations with industrialists, local elected officials and people living near factories organised? Finally, what were the results obtained in 1985, on the eve of the recovery of crude oil imports after the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks? Beyond that, it will above all be a question of asking ourselves what the creation of the S3PI really means and whether or not it constitutes a profund change in the perception and management of industrial pollution by the French State.

Tearing the Etang de Berre lagoon away from industrialization. Citizen mobilizations for making a territory up. This paper deals with the citizen mobilizations for the ecological restoration of the Etang de Berre lagoon from 1988 to 1992. The author describes these mobilizations as an attempt to tear the lagoon away from its industrial vocation. This tearing process has three dimensions: a reterritorialization of the lagoon, a shift of the economic paradigm, finally a reconstruction of forms of activism.

Today, the territory of the Etang de Berre and Fos‑sur‑Mer has forty-one Seveso listed industrial sites, near which a population of several tens of thousands of inhabitants lives. Marked by its industrial history, this vast area has been experiencing renewed conflict over its development since the 2000s. This article proposes to come back to the mobilisations of inhabitants and local stakeholders in Fos‑sur‑Mer: how has a form of “environmental concern” been able to develop in this territory turned towards industrial and port activities ? The evolution of the claims towards the discussion of the public utility of development allows us to follow the emergence of an eco-citizenship.

The Fos Industrial Port Zone (ZIP) is one of the largest in Europe. It covers ten thousands hectares and includes a large number of metallurgical, petrochemical and gas plants, as well as waste treatment and logistics activities. The cities of Port-Saint-Louis du Rhône and Fos‑sur‑Mer are located in its immediate vicinity. Approximately twenty five thousands people live there, under the influence of multiple polluting discharges. Although the press regularly reports on the claims made by residents concerned about their health, little information is available on the social effects generated by this pollution. Our article is based on an ethnographic survey conducted between 2015 and 2016, which allowed us to document the consequences of pollution on the habitability of the ZIP area. To do so, we interviewed residents about their domestic and environmental practices, trying to see how these were either prevented or modified. Our research identified forms of intimate knowledge of pollution and original accommodation practices designed to limit the risks of exposure. We called them “ethnomethods”. We show that they are nourished by the strong attachments that this area triggers, despite the damage inflicted by productivism.

The “land register of environmental disease” pointed out, on Google Maps, the micro-environments having been the direct cause of at least one proven case of preventable disease: whoever wants to clean up the territory must know where the risk lies. The product of a system integrated into the daily curative practice of a small network of volunteer general physicians, it restituted the information collected day after day according to a rigorous but not fixed procedure, equipped with a specific language and tools, defined as “a path from suspicion to knowledge of risk situations.” Case after case, linking universal scientific knowledge to the “terroirized” knowledge of the people under care, this experiment produced, between 1994 and 2016, interesting results both from the point of view of the knowledge and remediation of harmful situations and the development of a less consumerist medicine.

Mediterranean wetlands are subject to many environmental issues. The Palun wetlands in connection with the industrialized Berre lagoon are a special area of conservation located downstream of an anthropised watershed and where diffuse and cumulative contaminations of the sediments were detected. A work was then carried out on a water treatment process in the Palun watershed to promote the resilience of the receiving marsh. The possibilities of creating a constructed wetland upstream to treat all waters have been reflected in connection with the potential divergent uses and expectations of the territory actors. Repairing environmental damages in the particular socio-economic context of the Berre lagoon was considered from the knowledge of restoration ecology and sociology.

At the beginning of the 16th century, the Ottoman expansion towards the North Africa led to an important change in the political management of the Maghrib societies. During this process, the city of Algiers experienced several moments of social tension because of its incorporation into the structure of the Empire of the Sultans as a frontier province (beylik). Although Western historiography has reduced such conflicts to a struggle for political authority between two socio-ethnic factions —“Janissaries” and “renegades”—, the reality was more complex. Following a well-established historiographical debate on the decentralized management methods of the Ottoman Empire, this article analyses the characteristics of the political legitimisation system in Algiers between 1518 and 1562 in order to reconsider the ethnic competitions between members of the Algerian administrative-military apparatus as an expression of the political strategies within the Ottoman governor's household (kapı).