Contenu du sommaire

In this paper, we present two case studies that document the phenomenon of private sidewalk production. The sidewalks designed by private sector companies serve as a starting point to analyze the production of public space in two areas of the city strongly influenced by the dynamics of globalization. These sidewalks represent an object where the interests of different actors converge: economic actors (real estate developers), political actors (municipal authorities) as well as social actors (city dwellers), constituting an interesting unit of analysis of the private development and management of public space in Mexico City. In this article, we show the impact of major real estate developments on the urban fabric and analyze the uses and social practices of the people who use these sidewalks.

The present article analyses the process of recognising the legal personhood of the Rhône River. First, key variables are characterised from the operationalisation of legal personhood in four ecosystems: the Whanganui, Atrato and Turag rivers and the Mar Menor lagoon. The article demonstrates that these processes are bottom-up, developing initially outside the institutions and mobilising populations that have not been consulted up to now. While the articulation of the river's voice exhibits significant variations, the concept of legal personhood generally facilitates enhanced consultation of the riverine population. Second, in the case of the Rhône, there is presently a dearth of popular support for the recognition of its legal personhood. Moreover, the presence of numerous consultation arenas related to the river stands out as a salient feature when compared to the four cases examined. Nevertheless, the decision-making processes have been sometimes criticised on the grounds of being remote or highly centralised.

This article looks at the extent to which initiatives to tackle food insecurity in rural areas are based on food democracy in order to address the specific issues of rural food insecurity. A comprehensive study of the involvement of 17 actors in the Creuse region (France) reveals their capacity to encourage, to some extent, the emergence of food democracy, through strengthened collaboration and increased local population participation. This enables the development of initiatives that specifically target the challenges of mobility, food quality and the ability of individuals to make choices about access to food. However, the absence of a coherent territorial strategy at departmental level limits the ability of current initiatives to target all vulnerable groups.

This article proposes to use Derrida's “hantology” to deepen our understanding of conflict situations. Our case study, the failure of a cemetery project in the Lyon metropolitan area, allow us to focus on the difficulties caused by unresolved conflicts and the tendency of these failed projects to persist and, over time, to become ghosts, or “specters”. Because of the ever-present possibility of their return, these projects keep local inhabitants mobilized, even when the conflictual situation is supposed to be over. Building on this case, we then propose a temporal model for analyzing conflictual situations based on the Derridean view of haunting and conjuring.