This article examines the urban transformations of the city of Ennadhour (Tunisia) using a qualitative approach centered on the perceptions of local actors. It draws on interviews conducted with residents, institutional representatives, and development stakeholders to analyze the challenges related to governance, public facilities, socio-spatial inequalities, and urban sustainability. The study highlights rapid and unplanned urbanization, insufficient infrastructure, and weak coordination among stakeholders. However, the city’s economic development potential and citizens’ aspirations offer opportunities for improvement. The article provides a reflection on the issues of inclusive governance and strategic planning in medium-sized Tunisian cities.
This article examines the socio-spatial effects of the Prada Foundation's establishment in Milan, considering it as a lens through which to understand the contemporary mechanisms of urban production. By analysing this cultural project initiated by a luxury fashion house, the study seeks to understand how a private economic actor contributes to the material, symbolic, and social transformation of an urban area. Drawing on a qualitative methodology that combines semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and triangulation of documentary sources, the research highlights two main dynamics. First, it demonstrates how the museum operates as a strategic tool of territorialisation for the brand, by articulating heritage, aesthetic, and narrative dimensions around a reconverted brownfield site. Second, it explores the consequences of this cultural investment on the processes of touristification and gentrification in the museum’s surrounding neighbourhood, with a particular focus on shifting spatial practices, mobilities, and modes of co-presence between residents and visitors. Far from being an isolated cultural facility, the museum becomes a lever for producing new metropolitan centralities and constructing an urban narrative jointly shaped by public and private actors. As such, the contribution highlights the complexity of having Prada as a neighbor by questioning the rationale behind territorial branding and the social and spatial tensions it generates. The Milanese case thus illustrates how the Prada group, beyond its commercial activities, has established itself as an influential player in the production of a certain type of contemporary urbanity.
In Algerian cities, contemporary urban development is based on complex land dynamics, marked by the growing involvement of “small developers.” These actors actively participate in real estate development outside the regulatory framework, employing strategies aimed at circumventing or simulating legality. Joint ownership (especially of land), which refers to co-ownerships with undetermined shares, is common in urban areas and has long been perceived as a major obstacle. However, it now constitutes a strategic opportunity that triggers real estate transactions within ordinary residential development. These actors deploy various strategies to mobilize jointly owned land. These practices reflect a market-specific rationality, in which legal regularization often follows usage, rather than the other way around. The real estate projects thus carried out, often standardized in their morphology, transform the urban fabric and create tensions with neighboring residents. Studying these strategies provides a better understanding of the socio-spatial reconfigurations underway, as well as the limits of public action in the face of private initiative.
Now a globally widespread concept, food courts have boomed in French and Spanish metropolitan areas in the 2010s, including in their urban projects. Our work will aim to understand how this food service concept can be used to analyse urban projects and locations, based on sites in Lille, Paris and Valladolid. To do this, we will use a database, observations, interviews and documentary research. We will first show that food courts are places with widely shared characteristics and that they reveal a professional world of operational urban planning marked by the spread of best practices. We will then show that their inclusion in urban projects reveals the habit of urban planners to use objects and references that they adapt to the local context.
The world of board gaming has experienced significant cultural change over the past few decades. One of its most recent developments concerns the rise of board‑game cafes, places halfway between traditional cafes and board‑gaming associations, offering access to large game collections in exchange for food and drink purchases or an entrance fee. This article analyzes board‑game cafés as socio‑spatial dispositifs (Di Meo, 1985) that contribute to the production of new forms of urban sociability. The analyses presented here draw on non‑participant ethnography (Gold, 1958) conducted in 2024 in five board‑game cafés in Paris, on secondary sources (journalistic articles, professionals talks, etc.), and on three semi‑structured interviews with café managers carried out in 2025. This investigation highlights a dual movement : a growing cultural legitimacy for modern board games (Berry, 2018) and a transformation of contemporary urban sociabilities. In this study, board‑game cafes appear as territories of an adult play, located in urban centers and frequented by child‑free young adults from middle and upper‑class backgrounds. Board game cafes offer games adapted to the economic, spatial, and temporal constraints of the place, taking into account what they refer to as the “barability” of games. They construct a distinctive commercial identity similar to that of commercial third places (Burret, 2023). The analysis also sheds light on the situated experience of these spaces. Games function as mediators of sociability, while the material, acoustic, and relational ambiance shapes customers’ experiences, oscillating between conviviality, co‑presence, and tensions related to noise or crowding. By placing games back at the heart of the city, board‑game cafes contribute to redefining ways of inhabiting urban space, consuming culture, and producing social ties.
The footbridges over Lake San-Pédro in Côte d'Ivoire reveal a particular approach to the use of water resources and exemplify a new model of urban development, based on specific patterns of pedestrian movement. Whilst they address numerous development challenges, these footbridges suffer from problems relating to management and maintenance. This paper therefore examines the issues surrounding the increasing precariousness of these facilities within the city’s urbanisation and development process. To understand the place and role of these structures in people’s daily lives, this research employs a mixed-methods approach, involving a questionnaire survey of the people who use these footbridges. It was further enriched by a review of the relevant literature and by semi-structured interviews with public authorities. The results of this research provide an overview of the various footbridges, revealing that their construction is the result of the use of fragile and unsuitable materials. However, these footbridges facilitate significant movement among various population groups, which demonstrates their vital importance in the structuring of the built environment. The findings also revealed that these footbridges act as catalysts for spatial connectivity, sources of income, and alternatives to the environmental policy sought by the authorities. In the lakeside neighbourhoods of San-Pédro, these footbridges have thus become a key means of facilitating daily and commuter travel. This pedestrian mobility ensures better connectivity and integration between these neighbourhoods, as these footbridges have become, for certain communities, places for socialising and interaction, which poses new challenges for local planning. Given the opportunities these footbridges offer for the development of these neighbourhoods, our study provides decision-making support in the form of an assessment of the condition of this pedestrian infrastructure. It also recommended strategies and tools, such as collaborative action between public authorities and residents of these lakeside neighbourhoods, to rehabilitate these facilities and improve accessibility between the lakeside neighbourhoods of the city of San-Pédro.
The article analyses the redevelopment of the military citadel of Langres following the gradual withdrawal of the army from the site beginning in the 1990s. As the legacy of nearly two millennia of fortifications, the citadel—built in the nineteenth century as the last major French stronghold—quickly became militarily obsolete before definitively losing its strategic functions at the turn of the twenty-first century. The departure of military units resulted in significant economic, demographic, and symbolic losses for this small rural town, which was left with a vast and difficult-to-reconvert heritage site. The article shows that the redevelopment of the citadel was not based on a unified urban project, but rather on a succession of fragmented uses (housing, public facilities, road infrastructure, cultural projects), driven by essentially functional and opportunistic logics. This spatial fragmentation was accompanied by political fragmentation: strong local disagreements over the future of the site led to a gradual transfer of decision-making power from the municipal level to the departmental authority, particularly through the transfer of the former BSMAT site. This loss of local decision-making capacity prevented the emergence of a shared heritage narrative, despite attempts at tourist and cultural valorisation. The citadel thus appears less as a common good than as a space governed from outside, crystallising conflicts, controversies, and a sense of decline. Ultimately, the case highlights the limits of heritage-making processes when they are not supported by local consensus or embedded within a coherent urban project.
Since the early 2000s, many areas in China have been built using urban planning models and architectural styles inspired by foreign countries. Among these urban imitations, the Thames Town neighbourhood, with its English atmosphere and as part of an urban planning programme to build new towns on the outskirts of Shanghai, is one of the most famous examples. Sometimes perceived as a consequence of the globalisation of Chinese society, sometimes as a manifestation of a copycat culture specific to China, the neighbourhood is analysed through the prism of an identity crisis that characterises contemporary Chinese society. However, these discourses, based solely on an understanding of the neighbourhood's exotic architectural form, very rarely take into account the ambitions and aspirations of those involved in the production of this space. This research aims at showing, by comparing the logic, representations and practices of the various actors involved in the material, social and symbolic construction of Thames Town, that the neighbourhood is entangled in multiple forms of identification: between a small international town where an English lifestyle is unfolding, a reference to Shanghai's concessionary past, or even a place away from the bustling city. More specifically, despite the architectural and scenographic intentions imposed on the space by the local authorities and developers to produce an English identity for the place, another representation of Thames Town emerges in the daily practices of users and residents, questioning the importance of architectural form as a central element in identifying the neighbourhood and analysing the social and cultural processes experienced by China's urban populations.
This article analyses protest mobilizations that unfolded in downtown Tunis between 17 December 2010 and 14 January 2011, in a context of intense police constraint where the occupation of public space constituted a central stake. It examines how repression and control mechanisms (roadblocks, encirclements, filtering, dispersal) structured not only the most visible forms of action, but also the positions located at the immediate margins of the gatherings. The study relies on a qualitative approach based on seven interviews conducted between 2020 and 2022, drawn from a larger corpus compiled following a call for participants on Facebook. These accounts make it possible to reconstruct the concrete modalities of presence within the protest space: circulation through adjacent streets, observation from a distance, hesitation, occasional participation, or gradual engagement over the course of repressive sequences. Rather than establishing a fixed typology of actors, the article analyses the porosity and reversibility of positions (demonstrators, hesitants, passers-by, observers, curious participants) within an urban space that was constantly reconfigured. The analysis argues that these peripheral participants did not constitute a mere background to the gatherings: their movements, interactions and successive adjustments actively shaped the dynamics of mobilization. By densifying bodily presence and rendering visible cautious forms of spatial occupation, they contributed to the production of a protest space that was unstable and relational. Repression, far from merely dispersing protesters, could foster gradual processes of integration, through which engagement was constructed in copresence and shared exposure to risk. By adopting an intra-urban focus on the margins of mobilizations in Tunis, the article shows that collective action cannot be reduced either to a stable militant core or to a binary opposition between participation and passivity, but was built in successive layers out of differentiated forms of presence.
This article examines the contrasting heritage trajectories of two sites connected to the same Roubaix industrial dynasty — the Cavrois family: the Villa Cavrois, a modernist masterpiece by Robert Mallet-Stevens in Croix, and the Cavrois-Mahieu factory, a former industrial site reactivated by the cultural association Le Non-Lieu in Roubaix. It examines what heritage-making means in terms of place-making and socio-spatial inequalities.The Villa Cavrois followed a strongly institutionalized heritage path: listed as a historic monument despite local residents' opposition, purchased and restored by the State at great expense, it opened to the public in 2015 as a national monument. Its recognition rests on a coalition of experts — architects, art historians, heritage curators — whose authorized discourse took precedence over local uses and attachments. The Cavrois-Mahieu factory operates within an entirely different heritage regime: lacking any formal protected status, it is occupied by a cultural association working to keep the memory of the textile and working-class world alive through guided tours, artist residencies, and commemorative events. Its recognition remains fragile, dependent on local mobilization with limited resources.These two trajectories both reveal and reproduce socio-spatial inequalities inherited from the industrial era. Heritage-making distributes symbolic capital unevenly, consecrating some places as metropolitan landmarks while leaving others in more precarious forms of recognition.
Third places, as hybrid socio-spatial configurations, actively contribute to the redefinition of contemporary urban production modalities. At the intersection of economic, social, and environmental transformations, they serve both as innovative mechanisms responding to the multiple crises affecting cities, and as intermediaries fostering the emergence of local solutions to global challenges. These resilient spaces offer opportunities to experiment with alternative ways of place-making, by articulating the three spheres of production, socialization, and intimacy.
This article explores the symbolic and material production of urban place through a comparative analysis of three Lisbon neighbourhoods: Bica, Quinta da Vitória and Parque das Nações. Drawing on three ethnographic studies conducted between the 1990s and 2010s, the authors use the concepts of belonging, boundary, and displacement to investigate how urban places are made and unmade. The longitudinal and multi-scalar approach highlights how place emerges from the interplay between local practices (festivities, neighbourliness, associations), urban form (architecture, location, planning) and historical processes (heritage-making, gentrification, eviction). Each neighbourhood represents a distinct urban configuration: a historic working-class quarter (Bica), a now-demolished informal settlement (Quinta da Vitória), and a planned upper-class district (Parque das Nações). The article argues that urban places are not given, but produced through contestation, memory, and symbolic negotiation. Urban space is experienced as territory, as collective memory, and as a stage for identity-making. This contribution thus calls for a critical reconsideration of contemporary urban transformations by focusing on the micro-politics of everyday life and the spatial practices of appropriation, resistance, and displacement.
This article focuses on the renovation process of Fort La Pointe in Jérémie, Haiti, highlighting the marginalization of artisanal fishing. The citizen-led renovation initiative, spearheaded by Jérémie Ka Bèl, has been gradually taken over by NGOs such as Goal, whose approach neglects the historical, cultural, and environmental dimensions of the site. This article analyzes how residents experience this renovation in relation to their fishing activities. Based on an ethnographic survey of the site, using participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, the results reveal that the renovation has reinforced the recreational function of the site, thereby diminishing the essential activity of fishermen and fishmongers, which is central to lived memories and the local economy. Secondly, while there is a certain local pride associated with regular visits to the fort, the failure to integrate the activities of local residents into the project fuels a functional invisibility. The fort is conceptualized as a “trace-memory,” a vestige of the colonial, slave-trading, and revolutionary past, as well as of fishing. Thirdly, I introduce the notion of “sea dump” to refer to the persistent degradation of the coastal environment due to the lack of waste management, which directly affects fishing. This article contributes to the operationalization of the notion of “traces of memory” by linking it to that of “place-making” in the urban context of the Caribbean. It also proposes the conditions for inclusive and equitable heritage preservation in a context of decolonization.
This article examines the increasing flood risk in the Tongo-Bassa watershed (Douala), where rapid urbanization, near-total impermeability, and the tidal influence of the Wouri River aggravate floods linked to intense rainfall. It aims to show how the occupation of minor beds and spatial transformations reinforce hydrological and social vulnerability. The method combines documentary review, diachronic mapping (1971-2024), morphometric metrics, surveys/interviews, in situ measurements (floodmarks, embankments), and statistical analyses. The results indicate that artificialization has increased from approximately 10.5 % to 96.9 % at the watershed scale and 94 % in the valley, leading to fragmentation of forests, gallery forests, and mangroves, correlated with a sharp rise in overflow waters in the outlets and submersions reaching 0.9 m between July and September. Local residents are resorting to embankments, homemade dikes, and collective dredging, while institutions are installing retention basins and modernizing drains. These initiatives mitigate flooding locally but remain limited by uncontrolled urbanization and lack of maintenance.
Risk management, particularly of flooding, has undergone profound changes in recent years, with an increasing emphasis on diversifying management strategies and in certain local contexts, a questioning of the regulatory instruments of prevention-based management (the PPRs), in favor of a more “project-based” approach. This latter perspective reconfigures how risks are integrated into spatial planning, by making the urbanization of at-risk areas more conceivable. The article examines this evolution, highlighting the specific role played by the growing prominence of the tools, rationalities, and actors of crisis and emergency management, a dynamic described as a “crisification” of public action. It details the shifts in policies addressing flood risks and technological risks in urban planning in two agglomerations emblematic of these transformations, particularly in “risk-prone spaces”: the Le Havre industrial-port area exposed to coastal flooding, and two flood-prone neighborhoods in Nantes, Île de Nantes and Pirmil-les-Îles. The article also argues that this “crisification” is not limited to flood risk management, but equally applies to other types of major risks, particularly technological ones. It proposes a heuristic “multi-risk” perspective, placing side by side the management of these two risks—flood and technological—that are often studied separately.
Since the 2000s, flood prevention and river management policies have focused on nature-based solutions rather than heavy hydraulic engineering. Projects to preserve and restore flood expansion areas (FEA) are increasing, in an attempt to maximize river overflows in those areas. However, these FEA projects are planning operations that take place within territories that are occupied, appropriated, used and sometimes built upon, supporting a variety of projects and crossed by contradictory interests. This article examines the territorialization of FEAs - understood as the complex process of implementation and appropriation at local territorial level. To this end, several approaches to recreating FEAs in various territorial contexts - urban and agricultural - in mainland France are analyzed. These case studies show that local actors appropriations of the FEAs can be done by turning FEA projects into territorial projects. In urban areas, this has been made possible by architectural and landscaping approaches. These approaches have helped to convince local actors (elected representatives and residents) that FEAs can be a multifunctional asset for their area. In agricultural areas, the agricultural characteristics of the territories can act as brakes on the adaptation of farming practices. Even if they are well-established, these characteristics need to be reconsidered in order to reconcile farming and flooding in FEAs.
Since 2015, the French National Railway Company (SNCF) has been developing temporary urban projects on some of its sites that are undergoing urban transformation, in a context of growing interest for the concept of “transient urbanism” among urban professionals in France. These temporary occupations, developed on sites destined to host an urban project in the near future, are a strategic challenge for SNCF Immobilier, the operator in charge of managing and developing the SNCF's vast real estate assets. The objective of this contribution is to demonstrate the role of temporary urbanism in the process of patrimonialization of SNCF’s land. While these sites are intrinsically linked to the history of the company and its workers, the railwaymen, temporary urbanism is becoming a tool for “SNCF Immobilier” to enhance the memory of these sites and to accompany their transformation within the railway group. More broadly, these temporary projects are accompanying an awareness within SNCF Immobilier of the heritage value of these railway sites, which until now have been little valued within group, influencing the shape of the final urban project. Temporary urbanism is mobilised more widely as a means of staging the transformation of the site and the future urban project, in a context of increasing use of storytelling in urban development. This article is the result of three and a half years of ethnographic research, carried out in immersion within SNCF Immobilier as part of a Cifre programme. The field of study is focused on the Ile-de-France region and focuses in particular on the Grand Train project, carried out in 2016 in the Chapelle railway depot, which constitutes the main theme of this demonstration. This methodological framework allows us to analyse, from behind the scenes of the SNCF, the use of temporary urbanism as an institutional tool for the enhancement of the identity, symbolism and memory of its railways, in support of strategic and operational issues.
Au regard des changements climatiques et notamment de l’élévation du niveau marin, les sociétés côtières voient leur vulnérabilité s’intensifier, les conduisant à repenser leur rapport à la nature, au risque, et à elles-mêmes. Il y a maintenant plus de dix ans, la France s’est dotée d’une Stratégie nationale de gestion intégrée du trait de côte qui a introduit la notion de “recomposition spatiale”. Cet objectif, bien que nommé et mis en valeur dans les stratégies de 2012 et 2017, reste peu appréhendé depuis. À partir d’une revue systématique de la littérature francophone et la mobilisation de Scholar, Bis, Sudoc et Hal, nous interrogeons par une analyse qualitative le corpus résultant (n=112) afin de comprendre les cadrages théorique et pratique de la recomposition et leurs implications sur le concept. Nous retenons que malgré une multiplicité de publications évoquant le processus, très peu en soumettent une formulation précise et conceptuelle. Toutefois, certaines contributions proposent des apports méthodologiques et mettent en avant des obstacles d’envergure : inertie politique, contraintes financières… Cet article s’attache finalement à proposer une définition de la “recomposition territoriale” et une réflexion sur ses implications pratiques, les acteurs concernés et ses modalités d’application en France.
La gestion des risques d’inondation s’inscrit aujourd’hui dans un contexte de transformations profondes liées au changement climatique et à l’urbanisation rapide. Longtemps abordés sous l’angle exclusif de leur vulnérabilité structurelle, les quartiers dits informels restent insuffisamment étudiés quant à leur capacité à développer des formes d’adaptation pragmatique. Cet article propose d’éclairer cette question à partir du cas de Hay El Sellom, situé dans la banlieue sud de Beyrouth, un espace marqué par une marginalisation politique et institutionnelle. L’étude repose sur une méthodologie qualitative combinant entretiens semi-directifs, observations de terrain, analyse documentaire et recensements des épisodes d’inondation. Cette approche permet d’articuler les récits des habitants et des gestionnaires avec l’histoire récente des événements, afin de saisir la dynamique des réponses locales. Les résultats mettent en évidence une adaptation continue, portée par les habitants et certains gestionnaires. Elle oscille entre le « faire avec » — ajustements domestiques et actions ponctuelles — et le « faire face » — initiatives individuelles et collectives d’auto-organisation — dans un contexte où la gouvernance demeure peu efficace. L’analyse révèle aussi des dissonances comportementales : les habitants perçoivent l’inondation comme un problème quotidien et urgent, tandis que certains gestionnaires la considèrent comme un phénomène routinier, alimentant ainsi une exposition accrue au risque. Cette adaptation traduit à la fois la vulnérabilité des populations et leur capacité à maintenir une résilience minimale. Toutefois, son efficacité reste limitée par l’absence de coordination institutionnelle et par le poids des logiques partisanes qui structurent l’action publique. En conclusion, le cas de Hay El Sellom invite à repenser la gestion des inondations dans les marges urbaines, en reconnaissant la complexité des dynamiques d’adaptation continue et la dimension éminemment politique de la gouvernance.
