HDR Defense of Jean-Baptiste Frétigny

The unpublished volume is entitled :

The Escapist City: Large-Scale Mobilities in Urban Experience and Production

The defense will take place in the Bienvenuë Building, room B015 (ground floor), access via 12 boulevard de Copernic, Cité Descartes, Champs-sur-Marne (RER A: Noisy-Champs station).

Summary : 

This volume examines the urban significance of large-scale mobilities (touristic, migratory, or work-related) through contact sites that bring together individuals engaged in such mobilities and other urban actors, whether or not they themselves are mobile. I introduce the concept of the “escapist city” to show how these mobilities shape the relationships to the city of institutional actors, individuals, and collectives who free themselves from prevailing frameworks of urban order, both in urban experience and urban production.

The analysis highlights processes of selective (in)visibilization of these mobilities and their links to an elliptical making of public policies. It also demonstrates the importance of deconstructing the assignment of these mobilities to exceptionalized urban spaces, such as tourist hypercenters, airports, business districts, or areas with high migratory visibility. The study further emphasizes the key role of public spaces in the material, symbolic, and sensory conditions of a right to the city raised by these mobilities. Finally, this HDR invites us to think together about top-down escapism (exceptional urban planning, institutional laissez-faire) and bottom-up escapism (informal practices, occupation-based urbanism, and forms of escape) intertwined with large-scale mobilities, through the lens of social and environmental urban habitability.

Composition du jury :

• Virginie Baby-Collin, Professor of Geography, Aix-Marseille University (rapporteur),
• Nathalie Bernardie Tahir, Professor of Geography, University of Limoges (rapporteur),
• Xavier Desjardins, Professor of Urban Planning and Development, Sorbonne University (examiner),
• Didier Desponds, Emeritus Professor of Geography, CY Cergy Paris University (examiner),
• Caroline Gallez, Research Director, Gustave Eiffel University (guarantor),
• Pierre Lannoy, Research Director in Sociology, Université Libre de Bruxelles (rapporteur),
• Camille Schmoll, Professor of Geography, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (examiner),
• Serge Weber, Professor of Geography, Gustave Eiffel University (examiner)