Abstract

ESCAFFRE, Fabrice. Inhabitants practices in metropolitan areas. Intelligences of the ordinary urban. Bitácora Urbano Territorial [online]. 2020, vol.30, n.3, pp.43-54.  Epub Dec 07, 2020. ISSN 0124-7913.  https://doi.org/10.15446/bitacora.v30n3.86814.

This article offers a reflection on the inhabitants daily uses of metropolitan areas. Dealing more particularly with entertainment practices in public spaces, mobility alternatives to the automobile and social relations linked to housing, it aims to characterize ordinary urban intelligences built from direct uses of the city but also from the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The reflection is based on non-systematic observations carried out over the past five years in Toulouse (France), Medellin (Colombia) and Quito (Ecuador). After having proposed a theoretical analysis framework for metropolization and its ordinary uses, then the methods and the fields of observation, the article successively discusses the three examples of uses previously mentioned. Playful practices are analyzed as revealing the use value of public spaces and cycling and walking, mainly, as the affirmation of other models of urban mobility. Finally, the question of housing is analyzed from different forms of social valuation. These three parts make it possible to study the cognitive, adaptive, protesting and transformative capacities of everyday city practices as well as their limits. All of this underlines how metropolitan areas have use value and social value.

Keywords : metropolitan areas; daily; inhabitants; uses; alternatives.

        · abstract in Spanish | French | Portuguese     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )