Working-class Ecologies: Housing, Mobility, Gardens in Priority Neighborhoods – ECOPOP

Urban environmental transition policies are struggling to combine with the principles of social justice, especially when addressing the situation of the poorest populations and the most vulnerable territories. This lack of articulation is partly due to the media, political and epistemic invisibilization of working-class relations with ecology. However, research suggests the existence of plural forms of working-class ecology, understood as a continuum of practices that explicitly address ecological issues and emerge from working-class individuals and groups.

This project aims to deepen the concept of working-class ecology, by simultaneously focusing on on housing, mobility, and urban agriculture. These are key issues, as they form the basis of urban everyday life, are at the core of the actions of associations and public authorities, and are part of the ordinary transition in the field of urban planning. Regarding housing, energy improvements to social and private housing are both economic and health issues for the population, especially in a context where housing conditions influence people’s ability to deal with the impacts of climate change. In terms of mobility, the challenge is to ensure that the working classes are able to adapt and benefit from policies designed to reduce car use (notably low emission zones) and develop alternatives (public transport, cycling, walking). As for urban agriculture, different types of gardens exist, which, depending on their configuration, contribute to the food supply of the working-class communities, while also provide spaces for sociability and access to nature. However, their existence is frequently threatened by public authorities.

To address these issues jointly, the project will focus on the priority neighborhoods of the French “politique de la ville” (QPV), where it is possible to observe interactions between social classes and different fractions of the working class — particularly from an intersectional perspective — and where these three issues manifest in a variety of ways in residents’ daily life.

Thus, the project will help to overcome two scientific and methodological hurdles: the thematic sectorization of current works on working-class ecology, and the challenge of identifying and measuring situations and practices that fall outside the usual observable categories. The first objective is to determine in which cases it is relevant to conceptualize working-class ecology(ies), i.e. to understand which practices can be considered ecological, despite their impacts being mainly measured at the local scale and the limited conceptualization by stakeholders. The second aim is to develop indicators to measure this working-class ecology and capture its social and territorial variations in the fields of housing, mobility, and urban agriculture.

The project is led by a multidisciplinary team (geography, sociology, political science, data science) with a common interest in critical approach to the production of space. It proposes an inter-urban comparison between three QPV in Lyon, Marseille and Saint-Étienne, followed by a scale-up using a questionnaire survey. To this end, ECOPOP will draw on the team’s ability to articulate mixed methods — qualitative (observations, semi-structured interviews, photo elicitation, documentary analysis), quantitative (enrichment and statistical analysis of existing data, questionnaires) and hybrid (ethno-accounting) — to both document and analyze territories, practices and the meaning attributed to them.