Metropolitics

On the Land Question in India: The Case of Sriperumbudur Industrial Region in Peri-Urban Chennai

V. Gajendran — 2025-12-23T06:00:00Z

Amidst intense demand for land, farmers near Chennai, India face dispossession by neglect.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” My essay begins with a puzzle. The past two decades have been called the decades of intense land conflicts in India. There has been an outpouring of media and academic scholarship on agrarian landowners resisting and protesting the acquisition of their land for urban and infrastructure projects. In this context of land dispossession and opposition to

- Essays / India, Global South, land, land use, agriculture, farming, real estate, real-estate turn, periurban, Chennai

Power in the Periphery: Waste Conflict and Resistance in Periurban Kerala

Ashish Prabhakar — 2022-09-06T05:00:00Z

Ashish Prabhakar analyzes one Indian village's fight against a city waste processing plant in 2011–2012, illustrating the perils of rapid urbanization, increasing consumption, the diminishing carrying capacities of cities, and growing mounds of garbage. The village's pushback not only highlights the tensions between various levels of governance structures, but also signals the need for a deeper examination of urban planning and urbanization.
---- Series: Urban Wastes, Present and Future In

- From the Field / waste, waste management, conflict, periurban, India, Global South, periphery

Holding Their Own: Gilets Jaunes' Occupation of Public Space

Antoine Bernard de Raymond & Sylvain Bordiec & translated by Oliver Waine — 2021-04-30T05:00:00Z

The Gilets Jaunes (“Yellow Vests”) movement that emerged in France in the fall of 2018 was striking by dint of both its reach and its duration. An ethnographic survey conducted in southwestern France shows that this success was in part due to the organizational, symbolic and social resources offered by the occupation of traffic circles and the construction of shacks.
The Gilets Jaunes (“Yellow Vests”) movement started with a national day of blockades and demonstrations organized on November

- From the Field / public space, gilets jaunes, mobilization, protest, social movement, occupation, periurban, France

Political Conservatism and the Working Classes in France

David Gouard & translated by Oliver Waine — 2019-01-25T06:00:00Z

In her latest book, Le Vote FN au village (“The National Front Vote in the Village”), sociologist Violaine Girard presents a rigorous study of working-class trajectories “in search of respectability.” Resisting any temptation to offer an overarching, oversimplistic vision of the far-right vote, this work instead skillfully makes use of a municipal monograph to examine a village's political ecosystem in detail.
Since the late 2000s, studies of electoral behavior in France have sought to

- Reviews / periurban, local councillors, village, suburbs, elections, Front national, mayors, far right wing

Land Regularization on the Fringes of Mexico City: A Recipe for Reducing Inequalities?

Jean-François Valette & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-06-08T05:00:00Z

Mexico City's working-class neighbourhoods are the focus of numerous land-regularization operations. Jean-François Valette analyses the impact of these policies and the effects of land titling on already highly fragmented peripheral spaces.
---- Series: Land Rights in the Urban Global South. Regularization and Land-Ownership Policies in Low-Income Neighbourhoods Despite the explosion in the construction of legal “social” housing since the 1990s, the “classic” Mexican model of residential

- From the Field / inequalities, periurban, land, Global South, Latin America, Mexico, land tenure, land rights, land titles, land titling, Mexico City, title deeds, land regularization

Urban Desires and Lust for Land

Éric Denis (†) & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-04-20T05:00:00Z

In the Global South, vast swathes of periurban and agricultural land are being sold off and converted into financial windfalls. Éric Denis shows that the working classes also play a role in this commodification of land, giving rise to new means of producing the city. Moreover, this lust for land reveals these populations' desire to see the city expand and reach their doorstep.
---- Series: Land Rights in the Urban Global South. Regularization and Land-Ownership Policies in Low-Income

- From the Field / urban planning, urbanization, urban sprawl, periurban, land, agriculture, farming, Global South, working classes, India, land rights, land titles, land titling, production of the city, land use, commodification

Mitigating urban decline through the compact city? Reflections on 15 years of urban recentralization policies in Japan

Sophie Buhnik — 2017-12-07T05:00:00Z

To cope with a rapidly spreading and now pervasive phenomenon of urban decline, Japanese authorities have actively promoted “compact city” strategies. However, 15 years after the launch of the Urban Renaissance Special Measure Law, designed to rejuvenate the downtown areas of Japan's largest cities, the neoliberal-oriented rationale that underpinned many compact city projects is now met with mixed opinions in Japan, especially in light of its contrasting effects on seniors' access to urban

- From the Field / aging, periurban, downtown, city centre, Japan, shrinking cities, urban decline, urban shrinkage, degrowth, shrinkage, periphery, compact city

“Gentrification or ghetto”: making sense of an intellectual impasse

Anne Clerval & Mathieu Van Criekingen & translated by Oliver Waine — 2015-01-29T06:00:00Z

The debate on the causes, effects and extent of the “gentrification” of working-class neighbourhoods in the central areas of our cities has animated (and divided) the fields of geography and urban sociology for the last decade or so in France. This debate was reignited in September 2013 by the publication of a book by Anne Clerval titled Paris sans le peuple (“Paris Without the People”). In this article, Anne Clerval and Mathieu Van Criekingen reply with force to those fellow researchers and

- Debates / France, ghetto, gentrification, segregation, urban renewal, social diversity, suburbanization, periurban, metropolis, urban regeneration, metropolization, metropolitan areas, urban geography, urban sociology, depoliticization

Another Vision of the Suburbs

Jean-Christophe Bardot & Laurent Devisme & translated by Oliver Waine — 2014-05-07T04:55:00Z

Images of the urban fringes of French cities often tend either to condemn their ugliness or to revel in a strange fascination for these geometric spaces. Here, Laurent Devisme comments upon Jean-Christophe Bardot's photographs, and shows how they give a visible form to the imagined perceptions of these urban spaces.
It is often said that the French suburbs – the banlieues – get a bad press; what is more rarely pointed out is that urban spaces in general are often portrayed in a poor light,

- Essays / periurban, suburbs, image, photography, Le Bar Floréal, banlieue

The grandeur and decadence of the suburbs

Violaine Girard & Jean Rivière & translated by Oliver Waine — 2013-09-18T09:58:19Z

Periurban areas emerged in the 2000s as “new” spaces indicative of recent changes in French society – the weakening of the middle classes, the rise of the far right, etc. However, these spaces, which have been put under the microscope since the 1970s by geographers, sociologists and political scientists, cannot be reduced to the simplistic image promulgated by the media every election season.
Translated with the support of the Institut Français Dossier : Urban studies in France
“One fine

- Debates / periurban, vote, suburbs, elections, middle classes