L’habitat durable contre la mixité sociale ? Production et réception des normes d’habiter dans les écoquartiers

• Main Author: François Valegeas
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires du Mirail 2017-03-01
• Series: Sciences de la Société
• Subjects: sustainable neighbourhoods; sustainable housing; social mix; living standards; urban project; appropriation of space
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sds/4741

Sustainable neighborhoods are at the same time showcases, laboratories and stages of the construction of a sustainable city. Housing is the keystone of the conception of these neighborhoods. It’s both a support for the implementation of living standards which aim to regulate behaviors, and a point of tension in the practices and the representations of the inhabitants. The analysis of the gap between principles of conception and the real uses, highlights the importance of the households’ trajectories and residential choices in the understanding of living standards and spatial devices. Creating a social mix through housing, which can have different faces in every project, always leads to the cohabitation of households with different ways of living. Yet, the discourse about responsibility and the conflicts of uses show the omnipresence of inequalities in housing appropriation. These projects of sustainable neighborhoods, widely based on a technical and performative approach of sustainability, take little account of these inequalities.