If “cities” or “neighborhoods” have been the subject of an omnipresent discourse for more than four decades in France, a political, journalistic or scientific discourse, it is not certain that we really know what we talk about nor that the social reality of these territories is so well known. It is undoubtedly the opposite that is true, most of these discourses shielding a rigorous knowledge of the living conditions of the inhabitants of these neighborhoods, their experiences and their trajectories, their ways of living. being and thinking, or even the integration of working-class neighborhoods into the French social structure.
Sensitive or priority neighborhoods, “lost territories of the Republic” or simply “neighborhoods,” urban ghettos or declining working-class neighborhoods in sociology, the categories to designate them also appear to be floating. So we must begin with the work of deconstructing the representations that surround these territories in order to hope to understand something about them, a work that sociologist Pierre Gilbert tackles with rigor and brilliance in his book “Popular Neighborhoods. Undoing the myth of the ghetto” (published by Amsterdam). An essential book, in which he offers a systematic and critical rereading of sociological work that has focused on working-class neighborhoods in France for at least half a century.
Recording and editing: Aurélien Thome.
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