La fabrique des modes d’habiter: homme, lieux et milieux de vie by Annabelle Morel-Brochet and Nathalie Ortar (review)

This work brings together papers from a LADYSS (Research laboratory on social dynamics and space restructuring) seminar entitled Modes d’habiter given at the University of Paris I from 2004 to 2007. It is therefore quite heterogeneous. But despite the stated preference for interdisciplinarity, the studies are methodologically similar.

Nicole Mathieu’s introduction lays the theoretical foundations of the “modes of inhabiting” concept. From the outset it was defined as a synthesis between “genre de vie” studies, identified with the discipline of geography, and “lifestyle” studies, identified with sociology. The author explains why those two concepts taken separately are insufficient for the study to be undertaken. The genre de vie concept was developed in 1911 by Vidal de la Blache to account for ties between social behaviours and changes in surroundings. In the post-war period, however, when the primary concern of French policy was to respond to the housing needs of the population, the statistical and demographic notion of “housing” replaced “the house” as the dominant notion in geography. “Bodily” human beings (p. 40) were replaced in geographers’ sights by the statistical individual, easier to “house,” and this in turn meant scrapping the genre de vie concept. And the “lifestyles” concept would not do, explains Nicole Mathieu, because it “effaced the territorial aspect of realities and disregarded socio-spatial dynamics” (p. 43). Nicole Mathieu therefore forged the “inhabiting modes” concept – to reconcile sociology and geography but above all to designate a system of relations between the natural and the social. “The ‘modes of inhabiting’ concept was constructed to apprehend the entire set of relations that develop between two poles usually conceived of separately: places and environments on the one hand; individuals and ‘people’ on the other” (p. 51). A “mode of inhabiting” has four dimensions: “inhabiting and circulating,” “inhabiting and working,” “inhabiting and housing,” and “inhabiting and living with or alongside others.”

Though not explicitly organized on the basis of these four dimensions, the thirteen chapters that follow do discuss them. Each in its own way, the chapters by Elsa Ramos, Annabelle Morel-Brochet, Christophe Granger and Cécile Vignal raise the question of human circulation and territorial rootedness. The first two focus on the effects of residential migration over the life cycle. In her interviews with “provincials” [i.e., French persons not originally from Paris] living in Paris, Elsa Ramos glimpses the emergence of a sense of “roots.” Roots are understood to concern nature; they relate the individual to the place he or she “naturally” belongs to, whereas mobility and movement are perceived as social and therefore as sources of disorder. In the following chapter, Annabelle Morel-Brochet studies the role of individuals’ past experiences of different living spaces and their projections into the future in constructing their present geographical sensibilities, concluding that spatial well-being or ill-being are to be explained above all by past geographic experience.

To circulate is not necessarily to move elsewhere; it also refers to everyday mobility (not discussed in this study) and seasonal moves. Christophe Granger studied the historical construction of “going away for the holidays” in France. Over the twentieth century, holidays gradually came to mean leaving one’s usual place of residence. Early in the century, the “elites of the Republic” and the business magnates recommended a summer change of scenery for health reasons. This then became a new moral value: the point was no longer to escape pollution and overheated buildings but also to discover new places and the freedom and personal disinterestedness specific to travelling. Though until the 1970s over half the French population spent their holidays at home, the idea that vacation meant leaving home had become a shared representation as early as the 1950s and 1960s.

Cécile Vignal’s chapter establishes links between inhabiting, circulating and work. The author examines job...