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This article seeks to explain the development of urban ethnography and the successful careers of its practitioners, evident in the 1990s but not in the 1920s and 1940s, by examining several factors: the dispersion of University of Chicago students trained in fieldwork, the expansion of the graduate population, the urban revolts of the 1960s, the proliferation of urban research centres, and the growth of anthropologists' interest in 'urban' issues. The article thus provides a better understanding of what is usually imprecisely described as a consequence of the movement of ideas, by following people and institutional developments.

This article analyzes the diffusion of the “competitive city-regionalism” paradigm, based on the case of urban economic development policies in large French cities. It shows that the emergence and diffusion of this paradigm can be explained by the ideational power of the public and private experts who have built a professional career around this issue. The article insists on a specific attribute of these actors, namely their early inclusion in state networks, and studies the processes through which their ideational power plays out in urban public action. This paradigm, which was long dominant, is now being sidelined in favour of a new political cycle of urban policies.

This article documents the deployment of a new metropolitan critique through the ethnography of contestation in action in a neighbourhood in Nantes, France - Le Bois Hardy, in Bas Chantenay. It analyzes the make-up of a collective, without neglecting its internal differences, and its non-univocal relations with public actors. Using a typology of urban environmentalisms, we show the dynamics of a non-homogeneous group, the supports and activities that allow a credible and tangible critique of urban planning. Although there remains an artistic critique of the densification operations at work in the city centre, we rather examine a procedural critical activity that questions, on the side of the collective, the ways of apprehending the general interest. Starting from a singular mobilization, this article goes into the details of an emerging metropolitan critique in the making.

In this paper, I discuss the urban rescaling theory by questioning the forms of public action of Yaoundé and Douala's urban governments, the political and the economic capital of Cameroon. Indeed, to respond to the challenges related to the housing crisis, the Cameroonian State has carried out reforms giving a larger place to private actors in the real estate development sector and transferred part of its competences to the urban scale. These dynamics seem to be part of qualitative transformation and scalar reorganization of public intervention known as neoliberalization. The legislative process of decentralization of competences related to housing production can be understood as a rescaling of public action. Thus, analysis of the real estate programs conducted by the two urban government attest that Yaoundé and Douala are indeed scales of diffusion of neoliberal practices forged in the local governance arenas. We thus underline the variegated form of neoliberalization of real estate in Cameroon. In this paper, I discuss the urban rescaling theory by questioning the forms of public action of the urban governments of Yaoundé and Douala, respectively the political and economic capitals of Cameroon. Indeed, to respond to the challenges related to the housing crisis, the Cameroonian State has carried out reforms giving a larger place to private actors in the real estate development sector and has transferred part of its competences to the urban scale. These dynamics seem to be part of the qualitative transformation and scalar reorganization of public intervention known as neoliberalization. The legislative process of the decentralization of competences related to housing production can be understood as a rescaling of public action. Thus, analysis of the real estate programmes conducted by the two urban governments attest that Yaoundé and Douala are indeed scales of diffusion of neoliberal practices forged in the local governance arenas. However, because Cameroonian cities and housing remain key issues both for the construction of the Cameroonian State and for the legitimacy of Paul Biya's regime, the rescaling of public action appears unfulfilled. We thus underline the variegated form of the neoliberalization of real estate in Cameroon.

Published alongside the special issue Contester la métropole, the collective interview “Hey hey, ho ho, metropolis has got to go?” focuses on urban social movements fighting metropolises and the process of metropolization. This paper discusses this collective interview from a peri-urban perspective – with a particular focus on the section about protests outside metropolises. In that section, the authors relay the dominant images of peri-urban areas and imply there is no political engagement in these spaces. They also express a vision unattuned to existing forms of peri-urban political engagement. This paper aims to contribute to a better knowledge of peri-urban spaces; in order to do so, it attempts to deconstruct the generic representations of peri-urban areas which appear in the interview. It thus provides details on the socio-spatial categorisation of peri-urban areas in France, which is often oversimplified. It also shows that alongside cities, peri-urban spaces are sites of middle-class political engagement, and reveals the diversity of forms this engagement takes.