Paper short abstract:

The speech will focus on two Tunisian towns grown around the local mining industry and will show how power and state action affect the way homes are built and lived. Three specific buildings will be described to make general assumptions about what homes can tell us about territorial marginalization.

Paper long abstract:

When they think about precarious dwellings, researchers usually refer to shacks, tents, and shantytowns all over the so-called Global South and the peripheries of Western metropolitan areas. Those informal, self-built homes are represented as concrete examples of extreme marginality. But what happens when we turn our sight to cities and territories that suffer from social and spatial marginalization as a whole? What houses and buildings can tell us about the way structural dimensions affect the way people live in their habitat?

The speech will focus on the built environment of Redeyef and M'dhilla, two Tunisian towns grown around the local mining industry. Here, power produced a specific mode of living and changed the territory in a peculiar way.

Three different buildings will be described in detail: the little studio I lived in between 2014 and 2015 during my fieldwork research; the "villa" that a young man living in Redeyef had been constructing for himself at the time of my research; and the houses in M'dhila that bear the signs of the open-air exploitation system.

These three examples will help to shed a light on the extent to which the colonial past, the political economy of independent Tunisia, and the contemporary lack of any urban planning interweave and create the conditions of a disadvantaged and precarious life. Finally, it will be possible to make some generalizations about the links among power, state action, and the way homes are built and lived.