Contenu du sommaire : Mobilités et socialisations

In this article, we analyse the changes in mobility behaviors that are taking place in periurban and rural areas. To this end, we propose the notion of the mobility trajectory as a way to study, from a qualitative, individual and longitudinal perspective, changes in the practice of day-to-day mobilities during the lives of individuals by re-situating them within the long duration of biographical trajectories and the different socialization processes that take place in them. We explore in particular the interactions between the mobility trajectory of individuals and a particular instance of socialization: the residential space. Drawing on some 60 interviews, we highlight the role of socialization to mobility associated with childhood residential history, the effects of changes of residents on the acquisition of new dispositions or the processes of appropriation of local mobility options, which bring in to play a wide spectrum of factors. The trajectories also reveal a feedback effect when the negative experience associated with mobility practices influences the residential trajectory and triggers a move to an area with better mobility provision.

Based on research carried out in Lyon and Saint-Étienne (France), this article examines the socialization processes that lead to the adoption of the bicycle as a daily mode of transportation in an urban context. The authors investigate the roles of socializing agents, technical devices and the physical environment on long-term cycling trajectories. The article shows the influence of primary socialization in the acquisition of basic motor skills as well as the initial experience of cycling as a leisure practice before its adoption as an everyday practice. Subsequently, peer groups help to develop other skills such as direction finding, negotiating motorized traffic and wearing appropriate clothes. In addition to the transposition of skills from one practice to another, the article explores how technical factors—self-service bikes, e-bikes, motorcycles—and the characteristics of the territory contribute to trends among urban cyclists.

Drawing upon observations and interviews, this article analyzes the role of group mobility in the school in the urban socialization of middle schoolgirls from working-class backgrounds. By bringing friends together on the school route, the group walk to school makes compulsory schooling seem more acceptable, even pleasant. Because it imposes a group obligation, it encourages punctuality among middle schoolgirls. This practice is also an opportunity to start enjoying urban space. Because as young girls they are tightly controlled, group mobility is central to their urban practices. By walking slowly together, the girls create a small space of freedom, taking the time to enjoy the city.

We adopted the dispositionist and contextualist model to understand changes in transportation mode or modal change. Drawing on Guillaume's case, we were able to show that his involvement in carpooling as a driver through the BlaBlaCar platform is a result both of the establishment, during his socialization, of the main dispositions required for this practice (disposition to frugality and asceticism, taste for conversation with strangers) and of the context (in its professional, conjugal, family dimensions) acting on travel practices and their perception. A change in the way a journey is perceived as a consequence of its purpose may lead to the suspension of strongly established dispositions.

Non-commissioned officers in the French Gendarmerie are obliged to move geographically at recruitment and throughout their careers. This paper explores what this spatial mobility means in terms of professional socialization, particularly gender socialization, given the heavily male ethos characteristic of their profession. Women (who are in a minority) are expected to conform to “virilization”, as are men, since masculinities are plural. The men and women most attached to this virilization are those whose lifestyles are closest to the working classes, from which most of them are drawn. Non-commissioned officers use spatial mobility to achieve this gender mobility, because it helps them to distance themselves from their origins. But spatial mobility also produces gender inequality, mainly because it is essential to career advancement.

This article uses qualitative data and life story interviews to examine socialization to employment-related mobility. It shows how socialization to mobility in the form of frequent overnight absences from the family home develops through primary but also secondary socialization, which reinforces previously acquired dispositions. While a “socialization of transformation” can be observed through the experiences of employment-related travel, the findings suggest that a “socialization of reinforcement” is related to more positive and lasting mobility experiences. Some mobile workers were found to be socialized to mobility in the context of the family, school, and peer environment, whereas others acquire dispositions from domains other than work. Finally, while some people internalize dispositions to mobility, whether they activate them in their jobs ultimately depends on how they value employment-related mobility, how they identify with the role of mobile workers and family trajectories.

To what extent can mobility capital be considered a Bourdieu capital? Based on participant observation during the course of eleven missions with the organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and about fifty interviews with its members, we show that within MSF mobility experiences can be accumulated, mobilized, converted, depreciated, transmitted, and that although these experiences are not always exploited to move upwards in the formal internal hierarchy, they nevertheless enable those who have accrued them to gain in decision-making power over their future career within the organization. For these reasons we consider that mobility experiences constitute a Bourdieu capital, termed mobility capital, which refers not to the hereditary or transmissible component of one's capital, but rather to its living component, the part developed during an individual's life and representative of his/her successive socializations.

The article analyses French summer camps for schoolchildren from the point of view of the extraordinary spatial mobility it produces, in that it institutes a break with the usual urban, normative and relational framework in which the young people operate. What is the impact of this spatial mobility on the socialisation of teenagers from working-class suburbs who find themselves criss-crossing the French countryside at holiday times? The article shows that these managed vacations constitute both an ordeal and resources mobility. The presence of the group of adolescents and leaders—who share the same norms, codes and cultural references—institutes and mediates the confrontation with social, spatial and racial alterity. It attenuates symbolic violence and fosters an accumulation of not insignificant informal resources.

At the interface between the sociology of migration and a sociology of socializations mindful of individual trajectories and dispositions, this article examines the mobilities of children of sub-Saharan immigrants on return to their parents' country of origin in early adulthood (aged 20 to 30). Based on a qualitative sociological survey, the article shows the impact of the family socializations and transmissions that structure this type of transnational practice. It then distinguishes three forms of this transnational mobility (vacations with friends, return to roots journey, business travel), explaining these variations in terms of the education and professional socializations of the individuals concerned. Finally, it underlines the socializing effects and biographical (re)constructions this mobility represents for the individuals interviewed.

In this article, I investigate the extent to which cross-border mobilities during childhood and youth shape practical relations to the state. To do so, I draw on the narratives of adults who grew up in Northern France at different periods. I begin by describing the space of Franco-Belgian cross-border practices and its historical transformations. This enables me to identify how generation, social background and family structure lead individuals to adopt different cross-border practices. I then show how customs, legislation, taxation, prices and specialised shops constitute a system of symbolic and material signs through which young people learn about the varying forms adopted by state institutions in the vicinity of borders at different times. While the material presence of institutions diminishes over time, the reality of the state is recalled in various ways and sometimes clashes with the illusions nourished by everyday practices, particularly when it comes to considering longer-term migration. Finally, the article shows that while cross-border mobility may in some cases make people forget about the state's role in controlling movements, it cannot in itself endow individuals with a transnational habitus. In fact, young people born near borders grow up less without borders than with the border.

Away from the usual focus on major urban issues—models linked to the internationalization of cities and the regulation of metropolitan transition—this article examines the spontaneous and unthought spatial and temporal development of an urban social space and its morphology. The study undertakes a space-time analysis of a peri-central neighborhood in Hanoi, which reflects both the contemporary transformations of the Vietnamese capital and the complexity of the invisible spaces that are hidden both in the scientific literature and in the urban planning practice of megaprojects. In our method, ordinary city production is captured through the discreet day-to-day habits of the inhabitants, testimonies of non-experts, low-noise physical transformations and traces of local development plans. Interpreting the progressions and contradictions of urban changes in Thanh Nanh neighborhood as a transitional urbanism reveals more than ever the need for coherent public policies.

Some television series, beyond their ability to represent real or fantasized urban worlds, are also a good entry point into the processes, systems of actors, tools and instruments that govern urban production. As such, they can be of use for educational purposes in urban planning, and help to make these culturally anchored systems of urban production intelligible.We focus on the benefit of using Show Me a Hero, a miniseries retracing the battle for housing desegregation in Yonkers, a suburb of New York, in a teaching module entitled “Controversies in urban planning”. Its use triggered three main topics of discussion: (1) the difficulty of implementing federal housing policies at local level, (2) the unpacking of the specificities of segregation processes, and (3) the understanding of the authors' artistic biases as a condition for the analysis of the controversy.

In cities across Northwest Europe, the practice of assigning temporary uses to vacant spaces is increasing and becoming institutionalized, often as the first stage of a regeneration. At a time of growing land pressure, these practices, squeezed into the cracks of lengthy urban projects, can appear quite seductive and a good example of the makeshift and resilient cities that many urban planners are calling for. This article shows that the creative or artistic dimension often displayed by temporary urban projects can nonetheless be used to cast new light on the areas in which they are implemented, thus increasing their visibility and attraction to new investors. As such, temporary urbanism is as an active factor in the regeneration process, and not just an interstitial and neutral form of urbanism. To check this hypothesis, this piece of research draws on qualitative data from the case study of Balfron Tower, an iconic brutalist council estate in East London that was the epicentre for many ephemeral projects and occupants between 2011 and 2016, when it was refurbished into luxury private flats. It shows how these forms of temporary housing have contributed to a larger urban renewal strategy, which may turn out to come at the expense of the local population and the temporary occupants themselves. This article therefore argues for the spatial, temporal and socio-political recontextualisation of temporary urban projects, to question their alternative character and their extended role in the future city-making.

This article proposes to explore the questions and perplexities of urban dynamics and the future of cities by drawing on fictions of a particular type, those of cyberpunk literature, selected here for their heuristic potential and their ability to problematize certain major trends as a time of an expanding technocapitalism and diffuse forms of social disintegration. Treating this subgenre of science fiction, which renewed its aesthetics and some of its themes in the 1980s, as a laboratory, the article begins by highlighting the representations that cyberpunk novels by authors like William Gibson, Walter Jon Williams, John Shirley, etc. convey about the dynamics that seem to permeate the metropolises of these future worlds, in particular in order to specify the conditions and situations that tend to be problematized in this way. The article goes on to show the tensions that arise or re-emerge out of the productions of this literary movement, and the resources it offers for discussions around the evolution of territorial and social relations associated with the urban condition.