IS THE URBAN SPRAWL REALLY “URBAN” ?: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF RECENT POPULATION DYNAMICS IN FRANCE

Abstract

Urban sprawl is an issue that concerns a large part of researchers and actors from politics, sometimes in an ecological perspective (artificialisation of soil, increasing mobility), sometimes in a socio-spatial sens (segregation, governance). The author attempts to date and empirically measure the demographic and spatial extent of this phenomenon in France from 1800 to 2010. The implementation of the methodology necessarily lead him to break down categories of locations as precisely as possible: urban vs rural, urban sprawl vs emergence of cities, dispersion vs evasion. This approach leads to ask a fundamental question. Etalement (french), sprawl (english), dispersion (spanish), dispersão (portuguese) and even urban : are the words we use appropriate to the phenomena we aim to describe? Turning to an anthropological interpretation, the author comes to the last question: in some cases, is the current socio-spatial fragmentation of the population not putting in doubt the concept of urbanity?