From habitability to territoriality (and back) : of urban peripheries, individuals and collective bodies in interaction – TerrHab

The TerrHab research project (From habitability to territoriality, and back: of urban peripheries, individuals and collective bodies in interaction) is based on the following current spatial conundrum: why are the major peripheries of cities and metropolises decried as being so inhabitable and condemned for being the worst possible way of land occupancy according to the dominant social, functional, economic and environmental values even as they become increasingly inhabited ?
We are going to revisit this topic with three objectives:
- link the understanding of habitability of space to the analysis of the territorialisation of individuals and the collective bodies who appropriate the space and then build on it;
- show that it is not a question of the defeat of collective bodies by triumphal individuals, as is often argued, but rather a question of the intense social interaction between individuals and the collective bodies, which makes the territories habitable and territorialises the dwelling;
- contribute to the development of a general theory of territoriality and territorialisation, driven by our strong conviction that it can still provide us with answers to the spatial conundrums of life in society.

To do this, we have organised our interdisciplinary research group (geography, sociology, sociolinguistics, architecture, town planning, history, ethnology, etc.) into three research phases, involving four laboratories around the PACTE of Grenoble.

The first phase, which is a collective one, will define the scope of the issue and methodology. It will consist in forging the bases of a heuristic culture common to the researchers involved in the project, sharing the initial major assumptions, and in particular providing the team with a range of common methods that are as innovative and ground-breaking as possible. These will be tested before being adopted, in order to bring us new means of apprehending the real nature of urban peripheries with a reputation of poor habitability and territoriality.
The second phase will open four parallel study areas, initiated by each one of the partner laboratories in a combined range of fields: "movements" (CITERES, Tours), "civilities" (ART-Dév, Montpellier), "recreations" (SET, Pau), "inter-spaces" (ACS, Paris), each with very specific corpuses that all fall within the scope of micro-analyses.
The third and last phase, which is once again a collective phase, will bring together all the results of surveys, observations and field analyses into two products. The first one, which is an unusual one, will consist in producing together, the paradoxical dictionary of neologisms of the peri-urban dwelling, in order to show just how necessary it is to shake up the semantic codifications and the representations that claim to sum up the subject today. All in all, if there is indeed a conundrum, it is most probably because there is a dearth of expressions and words to describe this new current urban space that has lost its meaning because it has been defined with the words of the former urban space.
The second product will be an international conference where we will present our results to a panel of top-level foreign speakers and researchers to give our work the comparability and international scope that we deliberately chose to remove from the field phase in order not to risk dispersing our work. It still remains, however, that the information that we have collected and the interpretations made of it fall largely outside the domestic scope, and that the ultimate objective of further developing a theory of territoriality and territorialisation cannot be reached if there is no external input.
In the longer term, TerrHab will provide the innovative research network that it will have created on five sites, covering about half a dozen disciplines, with the means to continue with the cross-analysis of modern-day habitability and territoriality at an international level.