GRAC (2009) Ressaisir la citoyenneté aux bords du politique

This project consists in sociologically telling the forms of expression and action of political actors who are institutionally not part of public affairs because they are considered as being unable to contribute to define the common world. "Ordinary citizens" "marginals," "radical activists", "illegal migrants", etc.: a set of actors considered as partially incompetent or who are ignored in the regular political devices, but who nevertheless do participate in a political way to the transformation of city uses. Thus, our aim is to focus on the ordinary way of making politics, i.e. on experiences that do not occur within the regular political spaces, or on forms of struggle and critics deployed at the shores of politics. These experiences and struggles target urban planning projects, which lead to the metropolization of contemporary urban spaces.

What can we say about inhabitants’ citizenships, many of whom appear not to be involved in the participatory processes designed for them? Defining urban citizenship only as an ability deployed within the restricted scope of institutional devices, as well as considering citizenship as the sole product of these devices, would mean to endorse the idea that most people are politically inefficient or that ordinary inhabitants are politically worthless.

Thus we focused on different radical forms of "citizenship" that imply to conflictuality. While proceeding that way we won't only describe actors’ intelligence and inventiveness when they face their problems and those of their peers. We will also, and mostly, pay attention to the manner in which politics irrupts and breaks through the ordinary course of things. Our investigation is more specifically centred on political experiences of radicalisation, on the expression of a radical critic of gentrification that jeopardize neighbourhoods as living environments, and on the ways this critic is translated into actions.

The ordinarisation and the radicalisation of politics may seem as to antinomic logics. Nevertheless they appear in practice to be combined and articulated by some action groups, which we have encountered during our enquiry. One of our investigation’s main goals is to grasp this combination of ordinarity and radicality, one of whose notable form is a rupture of the usual distinction between the two figures of the “inhabitant” and the “activist”.

Whereas the classic definition of political delegation as theorized in France implies detachment from communities, our hypothesis is that politics lies in the different uses one can make of a city, a district or a neighbourhoud, i.e. in small-scale ties and attachments.

When urban plans reorganize the sensitive order of the city, when they lead to discrete changes into the ambiance of a neighbourhood (for example either by the installation of video surveillance cameras or by increasing the rents), it becomes obvious that politics creates attachments rather than being only made of detachments. Considering this ordinary of politics requires to take into account the bodily and emotional attachments developed in the ordinary course of things. ‘Ordinary’ here means the experience field of the actors and not the average value of an average citizen reducible to his vote and therefore akin to a pure statistical individual.