L’institutionnalisation des marchés informels à Paris : une situation d’entre-deux dans le gouvernement des espaces publics

• Main Author: Hélène Balan
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: UMR 245 - CESSMA 2014-12-01
• Series: Carnets de Géographes
• Subjects: Paris; informel; biffin; espaces publics; gouvernement
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cdg/387

In Paris, the development of informal markets sometimes gathering up to hundreds of people in public space raises the question of the institutionnalization of informal activities in a European metropolis governed by a socialist municipality. This paper questions the territorial and scalar issues of political controversies about these informal markets. It analyses the "in-between" situation created in the governement of public spaces by the defense of a "right to the city" for these precarious vendors and a local management of these markets through the mobilization of the "biffins" - street vendors of recovery goods, after a former name for scavengers. The point is to show how the controversies about informal markets lead to a case-by-case and at the margin treatment of this urban survival economy, which reveals the limites of promoting the local as the right scale for alternative.