Contenu du sommaire : Variations & dynamiques urbaines

The elites of the higher civil service in India : between local administration and national integration The top civil servants of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) have the duty to work for national integration, in both social and territorial terms, beyond their local-level administrative functions. Although the implementation of quota systems has democratized recruitment, this elite corps of the administration is still only poorly representative. The ideal of neutrality for the bureaucracy, deemed to ensure social cohesion by placing its members above particular interests, is strongly jeopardized by the partiality of certain civil servants, based on their regional, religious or caste-related ties. The pan-Indian structure of the IAS should also favour territorial cohesion. Yet appointments to the States on India's periphery, such as those in the North East, conjure feelings of great apprehension which means that they are often got round, whereas they are exactly the regions in most need of integration with the nation as a whole.

Between collaboration and confrontation : the ambivalence of relations between public authorities and street children in Lubumbashi (DRC) This article takes field surveys as a basis for building an understanding of the ambivalence found in the relations between public authorities and street children in Lubumbashi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Examination is made of the discourses and practices of administrative authorities, police officers and street children in an attempt to bring the dynamics of their daily social relations into relief. This reveals the margin of manoeuvre the street children manage to negotiate in the city's political sphere. And local councillors and law enforcement officers try at the same time to control and manipulate this force. It transpires therefore that the relation between the three parties stems less from a dialectic of domination and resistance, or from a logic of connivance, than from a game of reciprocity, having sometimes sometimes positive, sometimes negative effects.

Marriage, fecundity and conjugal autonomy in Madagascar The ways in which couples are formed and their relational dynamics in rural communities of Madagascar are examined here. Focus is trained more specifically on the role of the family in the choice of spouse and the birth of the first child. Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data collected in a rural district of Hautes Terres showed that on the one hand young women and men have considerable freedom in the choice of spouse, yet on the other that the family's control over the couple's fecundity_mainly concerning the birth of the first child_is still very strong. Socio-economic changes such as the development of migrations and schooling, land saturation or monetarization of the economy have enabled couples to gain a certain degree of autonomy in relation to their family. Marriage no longer represents a great collective issue, whereas procreation remains under family control, to the point that a couple who do not provide rapid proof of their fertility can be pressurized into breaking up.

Domestic employment of women at the interface between the public and private spheres (São Paulo - Brazil) The aim of this article is to analyse the recent changes in the social and sexual division of labour in a popular urban area in Brazil (São Paulo), approached from the point of view of domestic employment, a sector that reveals new relations and links between public and private spheres. In an ambiguous situation of recent democratic opening and of sustenance, or even reinforcement, of old social and sexual inequalities in the context of globalization, the Author studies the changes in the conditions in which this work is exercised and the meaning of this activity. The starting-points are social, professional and geographical paths of domestic employees and their families.

Subcontracting at Honda in Brazil : some aspects of the processes of work, discrimination and union organization Presentation is made of a case of subcontracting in Brazil involving the motor manufacturer Honda. The Author considers this case to be emblematic, as it is characteristic of a strong tendency in Brazil's current employment market : the implementation of forms of production organization inspired by Japanese Toyotism. In Brazil, the introduction of sub-contracting has brought with it increased insecurity in the workers' terms and conditions. That comes out of this report of a study of this process up to 2002. The article examines notably the emergence of conflicts between the different categories of employees who work together (from the car manufacturer and the subcontracting firm) and the negotiation of their status around the trade-union organization, one of the indicators of their attachment to different categories (workers and employees).

Kayes, an open city. International migrations and transport in the west of Mali In the Sahel, towns and cities born of the colonial era are experiencing a revival as points of passage for international migrants. Such long-distance flows of people are stimulating local areas into a new dynamism. The town of Kayes, in western Mali, is the scene of fluxes of travellers voyaging between different African countries. It owes its attraction to its position in West African transport networks. The circulation of people at different scales means that the borders with Senegal and Mauritania are no longer barriers but spaces for regional integration.

The Sahelian model of movement, mobility and spatial uncertainty Societies at both edges of the Sahara have structured their space on the basis of mobility rather than on zones of production activities. Although development strategies persist that are still based on self-sufficiency and zonal specialization, they have retained an ability to deal with uncertainty, including its new globalized forms. This paper presents a dynamic model of this mobility, which is more than straightforward movement, and its application to the urban markets of Gaya, Malanville and Kamba, located between Niger, Benin and Nigeria. It supports the hypothesis according to which the motives of local “patrons”, like the initiatives of States and of development agencies, all have as their aim the improvement of the way uncertainty is managed, but remain nonetheless profoundly opposed as to the strategies to adopt. A generalized mobility therefore shapes the framework of social competition along with the control of space. This feature helps reinject the Sahel region into the mobility flows that shape the contemporary world.

The problem of reconciling heritage conservation and urban development. UNESCO's World Heritage classification of the old quarters of Harar (Ethiopia) UNESCO World Heritage (WH) Programme is currently undergoing a strong multiplication of sites in all parts of the world. The determinant factors and conservation methods it uses are founded on universal criteria. It nevertheless appears that in reality each classification is strongly associated with issues of development at work at a particularly local scale. This is the case of Harar in Ethiopia whose old town was classified as a WH site by UNESCO in July 2006. Beyond the ambition for international recognition of an architectural heritage, with the underlying hope to pass it on to future generations while attracting tourism, the latent background is one of the political choices in urban planning, fundamental for the city's future development.

The urban fringe in Rio de Janeiro : from the expression of disorder to mobilization of resources The place that the fringes occupy in the urban processes in Rio de Janeiro is examined based on the respective analysis of a geographer and an anthropologist. The terminology employed is first clarified, subsequently two case histories are considered. One concerns a process of heritage conservation of a favela, or shanty town, in central Rio, the other investigated a sea-front redevelopment project at Copacabana. Although these two study spheres are different in nature _ a space and a set of practices _ and in the social and economic forces they generate, each yields clues for identifying a specific type of political approach to spatial and social fringes in urban areas. Both cases reveal that there is a permanent movement that aims to live and think differently about the city, in the interstices of existing norms, which shows both the discriminatory processes practised by the public authorities and the interstices open for action

Mexico City's giant housing estates. New forms of social housing, living environments and reshaping by the occupiers The peripheral expansion of Mexico City's agglomeration is today following the dynamics imposed by the domination of the enormous social housing construction companies. The volume of production has been massive – almost 400000 housing units built over the past ten years – and has pushed out extensively at the agglomeration's margins. These developments have led to poorer standards of the models, and greater uniformity of the housing stock. This phenomenon takes the form of an unprecedented urban “object”, the “urban estates”, the enormous size and functional paucity of which comes along with an insular-style design. The article explores how the people who live in this new kind of urban periphery faced up to their life in a residential space whose very character tends to isolate inhabitants, both socially and spatially.

Marginality and urban inclusion at Medellin (Colombia) : a historical study employing planning instruments A historical approach is used to examine schemes set up by Medellin city council to control the expansion of informal housing on the hillsides surrounding the city. Such expansion was long considered to be transitory, hence planning measures were restricted to establishing formal limits to city development, leaving the informal urban areas out of any planning initiative. The 1970s saw a change of approach, with the gradual integration of these areas into the formal city by distinct programmes rather than more integrated schemes. From the first measures introduced to acknowledge, take better account of these informal expansions into account and improve them, up to the construction of infrastructures of sufficient scope and the implementation of the Integral Urban Project, there were many such schemes. In spite of considerable efforts and notable advances in perceptions of these phenomena and in the modes of action taken up, news items often report evidence of lasting processes of social exclusion, and testify to a multiform urban reality the issues of which remain alive.

Urbanization, contestation and decentralization. Land management and social representations in Burkina Faso In West Africa the decentralization process progresses and land management operations are more numerous. Sometimes in the name of local participation, these operations reinforce social exclusion. This paper analyses the conditions of possibility of popular protests in this context. The article uses the theory of social representations in order to understand the popular perception of these operations, the link between the obligation and the will to attain the “urban condition”, the transformation of access to the city and the increasing expression of arguments advocating autochthony in the secondary cities. To connect all these aspects the text describes local and global issues that enter into a typical land management operation in a secondary city in Burkina Faso (Koudougou).

Yopougon, Yop city, Poy... periphery and urban model in the Ivory Coast A highly specific example is used to examine the possible links between periphery and marginality, which are far from obvious. Yopougon is a community on the periphery of the agglomeration of Abidjan. Although it is relatively isolated and quite poorly connected to the rest of the city the hypothesis is formulated that such an area cannot be analysed purely in terms of a margin. Yopougan had in fact been designed in the late 1960s as a showcase development of Ivory Coast savoir-faire in planning for urban growth. Development ion the life of the area since the economic crisis of the end of 1970s was certainly marked by a halt to State intervention and an impoverishment of its population, but was at the same time the opportunity for the people living in that area to clarify their place in the agglomeration, or even to position Yopougon at other scales. Today its importance as a cultural and political center in the Ivory Coast is indisputable.