Paper short abstract:

Are urban wastelands spaces of uncertainty in the city? How do they isolate and make the planned and controlled city penetrable for people who are evicted of housing? What disturbs us in those uncertain spaces? Drawing on this, what can we learn concerning the making of the contemporary city?

Paper long abstract:

The urban transformation of the city produces constantly uncertain spaces: urban wastelands. Without definite function, neither exploited nor productive, these spaces have no recognised use. Not qualified in the urban plan, not represented on the city map, they are undetermined spaces. Their existence is limited but undefined. It's often difficult to reach them physically, and it's illegal to penetrate them. They are isolated spaces out of determinated, regulated and planned city.

But, as they are situated in the middle of the city, they become indispensable opportunities for inhabitants who don't have other solutions for living and who will implant themselves in this in-between of the urban planning. These habitations are also uncertain: materially precarious, fragile spatially and temporally. The inhabitants are constantly evicted: Whilst escaping the surveillance of the power, they are not completely out of its reach.

What is it to be a "citadin" (feeling to belonging to) without being a "citizen" (without right to the city)? How is it to experience the tensions between the planned and controlled city on the one hand, and the undetermined and uncertain city on the other?

The presence of these habitations and inhabitants disturb. In the media and in public discourses, they are visible in the event of crisis - extreme cold, fire, overcrowded in insalubrity, social misery - put on the public space the figure of the stranger and its collective representation. What does the link between right and norm tell us about uncertain and disquieting habitations in the city?