Over the course of the “Trente glorieuses” (“Glorious Thirty”), the Fordist urban development model led to urban sprawl and peripheral development, and thus to the emergence of the suburbs. In a binary, center/periphery relationship, this model produced a functional, infrastructural, service and budgetary impoverishment of urban centers. Starting in the 1980s, however, a real spatial reversal appeared: communities, activities and capital investments slowly returned to the city, timidly at first, in the form of residential and/or commercial gentrification. This movement then accelerated and spread in the 2000s, resulting in a more nuanced outcome in 2019: residential urban peripheries appear to be the primary losers of the last two decades of planning and public policies. France’s “yellow vest” crisis appears as a possible manifestation of this outcome. Mindful of both current events and long-term processes, La Fabrique de la Cité intends to explore the following three dimensions of the return of the economy to the city (center):
- The spatialization of the phenomenon, accompanying urban dynamics, and their key urban paradigms;
- The political economics of the return of the economy to the city’s political economics, and the associated capitalistic models;
- The terms and conditions of the transition from the Fordist to the post-Fordist urban model, its political factors and the resulting social tensions.
