Paper short abstract:

While research on 'participatory practices' tends to concentrate on the extent of their actual democratic or participatory dimensions, this paper will try to analyse, through two sets of practices and representations, forms of involvement in the city as a political space, and the kinds of territorialisation processes it gives space to.

Paper long abstract:

In contemporary European cities, institutionalized procedures of « citizens' participation » have become a generalized feature of "local governance". While in Britain, this often takes the form of tenants' "self-management" of estates or of public/private partnership, the multiplication of "participatory" councils at the neighbourhood level has been the main form taken by such a development in France. Most of the research carried on about such procedures aim at determining the extent of their actual democratic or participatory dimensions. But very little attention seems to be paid to the ways they inform citizens' relationships to the urban space, and the types of territorialization they propose.

Based on two fieldworks led in Tours (France), this paper's main topic will be to explore and analyze how such issues are dealt with in two radically different types of "participatory practices". On the one hand, the local elected Council set up (within the framework of the 2002 Law on "local democracy") "Conseils de la Vie locale", the working procedures of which tend to produce specific forms of "depoliticizing territorialization"; on the other, an informal group of local youth set up a "merry political festival", one of the main aim of which is to give back its political role to the urban public space, by its reappropriation from the private and commerce.

These two sets of practices and representations will be contrasted, so as to grasp different forms of what it means today to get involved in the city as a political space, and the kinds of territorialization processes it gives space to.