Le territoire comme télépouvoir. Bans, bandits et banlieues entre territorialités aréolaire et réticulaire

Résumé En

Territory as Telepower. Bans, Bandits and Banlieues between Zonal and Reticular Territorialities.This chapter is a discussion about different conceptions of “territory”, from a geographer’s point of view. In France, the dominant conception identifies the territory as a continuous area appropriated by an agent, whose power is exercised through the control over one space such as a private piece of land or a particular political-administrative entity (from municipality to State). By contrast, a power that doesn’t correspond to a continuous area is deemed as “non-territorial”. This conventional distinction could be challenged by an alternative conception, opposing and combining zonal and reticular forms in the territorialization of power. While the former leads to the control over a continuous area in order to exercise power on that is inside and against that is outside, the latter connects the discontinuous network of places wherever the subjects or objects submitted to the same power are. These two processes coexist in the social production of space: for example, in contemporary conurbations, the inhabitants’ practices produce reticular or networked territories, while the citizens are governed through political-administrative zonal territories. This theoretical proposal is applied to the long-term analysis of liminal territories to explain their persistent marginalization. It goes from the early spatial dimensions of the medieval “ban”, to the fringes where “banished” and “bandits” where concentrated, and to the contemporary “banlieues” whose urbanity and proper territoriality is repeatedly denied.