1The interview with Bahia reminds me of the work that I did on the “worlds of ethnicity” (Boubeker 2003), and more precisely on the “intermediate spaces” in the city. Conceptualized according to different research perspectives (Joseph 1991; Roulleau-Berger 1991, 2003; Boubeker and Paris 2004; Moley 2005), this notion of intermediate space makes it possible to account for the possibility of each urban dweller registering in the city a diversity of routes whose core remains the private sphere, like the thresholds from which trajectories in the urban space develop. Spatial proximity is not the guarantor of social and cultural proximity, so it is the threshold function of the intermediate spaces that must be questioned to understand how to combine homogeneity and heterogeneity in the near space. In this perspective, the link between the local and the global joins one of the public and the private, which have no meaning without each other in neighborhood life: they are closely intertwined, and their borders are constantly moving. I will cite in this text some extracts from the interview with Bahia—with some regret, as the richness of this interview makes the choice of quotes difficult—before attempting to provide some additions, clarifications, and theoretical openings or offer comparative links with grounds—very close to Bahia’s Givors from a geographical or sociological point of view—which I explored in the years 1980–2000.

The Passages and Crossings of an Imaginary City

Extract 1 Bahia: We’re going to cross, we’re going to go through there. There is something that you learn quickly when you grow up in the center, it is that all the streets lead to the same places, it is a kind of mini-labyrinth with lots of streets that meet all the time […] The buildings there, they have just been built, and we were playing underneath […] And therefore there was a passage that joined the other side.

2This first extract underlines that against the field of a too-detached look from the observer, behind the usage lines instituted in common spaces, the trajectories of the actors draw cross paths, “arts of doing” (De Certeau 1980) on a daily basis, a policy of cunning which allows one to play with constraints, to divert formal rules of use. Living does not only refer to a street number, a domestic interior, but also to a journey: the neighborhood, a street corner, a subdivision as so many landings to exit and enter. Intermediate spaces, passages, or crossings are thus found at the crossroads of concentric paths, like the steps of a way of living orientating the sense of territoriality, a network of definitions linked to rites of recognition or installation, or various rounds also to escape a house arrest. Bahia, like so many other anonymous actors of the everyday life of the eastern suburbs of Lyon that I met, tinkers with words and gestures the neighborhood’s little places, its hubs and its distribution networks through towers, their hidden corners, faults, hideouts to escape the gaze of others. And Bahia’s testimony resonates like an echo of that of a young man from Vaulx-en-Velin whom I quoted in 2004: “Intermediate spaces? There is only that here—nothing permanent, only transitory, transit, paths, and dreams of passage to escape a destiny of ‘Hittiste’ (wall holder)—and even the lads who rust in the stairwells make their cinema.…” (Boubeker 2004).

Extract 2 Bahia: We were outside, we were playing, we were inventing stories […] There too we have a passage to pass under the small bridge. […] So, this is the Metallurgy district, and as soon as you pass this street, you enter the district of la Jument Noire (the Black Mare)! And there were sort of little rivalries between the neighborhoods.

Extract 3 Bahia: It was our wall, we had tagged a lot of things […] It was all our life! There it was, our little secret passage. We wrote there too, but they rewrote it. There, it was the soul sister who wrote. There, it’s her best friend. Therefore, there, it is more the generation of 2000 that wrote and that covered those who came before.

3These two extracts allow us to evoke an essential dimension of intermediate spaces that can be found in other urban contexts. This notion can indeed be applied to different registers according to social backgrounds and their territorial constructions. So, by exploring the intermediate spaces in different configurations of the inhabited city, the challenge is not simply to discover niches of the imagination of the city dweller—seen as supplement of soul—but rather to find a materiality embodying practices. If there is no mechanical link between physical morphology and social life, the invisible city of social practices finds a support in the places’ morphology, and it is then a question of distinguishing not only different urban environments, but also strata memorial. Depending on cultures, generations, or social backgrounds, the use, appropriation, or invention of intermediate spaces in the recesses of the inhabited city are available according to different registers offering to each individual—often in the context of a group of references—the opportunity to tinker with alternatives, to cut through the back roads, paths outside the marked routes of the role and status, to profit not only symbolically but also economically or politically.

Extract 4 Bahia: For me, leaving the family cocoon is what scares me […] and not leaving from here. On the contrary, if leave this place, it means that I succeeded, I won. I ran away.

Extract 5 Bahia: Me and my gang, we are not troublemakers! We are just people who want to go out all the time to find each other. Our own time is in the evening. During the day, there are too many people outside, they see you and they talk!

4Poet and epistemologist Gaston Bachelard taught us that home precedes the universe and that the space of the familiar is the natural place of the function of living: “We sometimes think we recognize ourselves in time, while we know only a series of fixations in spaces of the stability of being […] Space is used for that” (Bachelard 1957). In resonance with these extracts from the interview with Bahia, on the grounds of “the city without quality” (Joseph 1998) or the fragmented urban space (Rémy 2002) that I was able to explore, I found that an arrangement of successive thresholds connects private space to public space. The “home” can extend to collective places. When social precariousness prevails, space-time is intertwined and the spatial limits which are imposed on everyone are redefined from the inside. The “home” is not just the place of refuge but also a place of a strategic use of the decor as a facade in order to find a way out “to get by.” Therefore, the student like Bahia, cohabiting with her parents, marks her territory without disturbing her family and neighbors, by respecting thresholds, successive moments when everyone can occupy their place and play their roles. In the suburbs, the domestic scenes can be prolonged in the street because the space is smooth—neither real community places nor marks or local heritage allows the distinction of the place of different groups—and each group must save the face of the others in order to save its own, which of course does not exclude conflicts and territorial rivalries. The common spaces are places of confrontation or sharing between different types of users, different groups. In the same building hall or in the same playground, several users’ paths cross, several courses that are very different communication channels. Therefore, these tracks overlay on the same space without being confused, and each has its scenes and its dramatic structure. The space thus composes the appearance in a subtle play of shadows and lights or of veiling-unveiling. Therefore, in the absence of a natural community, the logics of identity pass through a superposition of family and neighborhood ties and a marking of urban space: the urban context then appears as a superposition of imaginary territories where new identities are negotiated within intermediate spaces. These modes of self-proclamation often lead to conflict and cohabitation problems (Margier 2017). But the rhythms of different uses can exacerbate a segregation of roles, and the intermediate spaces thus welcome a juxtaposition of social universes partially invisible and permeable to each other.

The Ghetto Town and Its Intimate Tyrannies

Extract 6 Bahia: It is a very small city, everyone knows each other. And therefore, there are families […] it’s already been two or three generations that they have been there, and therefore, they know the other families. And they don’t get new ideas, they stay on the same stuff. […] It is, “you come from such a family, you are that!”

Extract 7 Bahia: “They are all winos there!” They are all posed at the café rouge or at the café bleu. When you walk you feel like a piece of meat. But you get used to it! Then, you have to go beyond the looks, but they are useless, they hold the walls.

5In small towns or urban enclaves, stories, rumors, and gossip take the place of truth. But Bahia does not evoke a structuring function of the gossip with which I have dealt in some of my studies on the suburban worlds where everyone also tells of their side roads and their crossroads to draw up the register of an imaginary territory. And only the mediation of the story, its staging and intrigue allow individual identity dreams to be part of a relationship game. Thus, the stability of the world of the “cousin district” (Boubeker 1982) is based on spoken words: in bars or street corners, band discussions on the hard times, going outside the territory, everyday events, are interpreted collectively to be recognized, appear in a story, take place in a social syntax. The big family of the “cousin quarter” is therefore accomplished through language, passwords, codes, repetition of speeches and jokes heard a thousand times. With these words, a formal ritualization of the exchange allows everyone to recognize themselves as being from the same world. Everyone can make their own cinema by listening to the one that evokes the shared mythical memory: the members of the big family need the story, the legend to believe that they are together, and the narrator, like the storyteller according to Marc Augé (1997), needs their reverie to believe in himself. To participate in an imaginary family is also to enter the stories of others, to run after rumors, and thus to build one’s world. Bahia nevertheless testifies to the drift of this narrative “between oneself” veering into the tyrannies of intimacy, when, to defend their share of the ghetto, some spend their days spreading the worst rumors. It is the drama of life when cut off from the world: in a small world, increasingly characterized by social withdrawal, it is necessary to find those responsible for its own misfortune. These community failures turn into the tragedy of the ghetto, because what does not change ends up breaking from the inside, rotting on the spot.

Extract 8 Bahia: But mainly, people, they are vicious here. They will speak behind you, they will make you a reputation behind your back, and then it comes to your mother’s ears […] it’s “your daughter is out after 9 pm so she’s a whore!”

Extract 9 Bahia: In fact, I have the impression that it is a vicious circle […] each story of each family repeats itself […] And so suddenly, when the big brother goes to jail, the little one takes his place!

6Bahia evokes here the routes of misfortune that I found on my land and which are experienced as a kind of curse. As if immigration were just a sad Mektoub destiny, each generation experiences the same tasteless failure. The narrative of the suburban worlds resonates like the swarm of obscure lives, through successive waves of beings as vain as they are pathetic, repeating the same mistakes, the same errors, the same complaints. Immigration as a legacy fatality. Fatality of misery sealed by the violence of the uprooting of origins. Fatality, also, from a legacy of mistrust from one generation to another. Fatality, again, from an inability to take the key to the fields, far from the city. An active incapacity, in fact, because in the absence of collective action, it is what allows us to reconnect the links between the “rats,” as Bahia calls them, around a hopeless sense of history. It’s a kind of magical thought that depends on the morbid relationship to a city: an almost-possession through the violence of a setting with no horizon, an environment of precariousness closed to all perspectives.

Extract 10 Bahia: In fact, what you need to know is that all the young people I know of my age, our dream is to leave from there! We see it as a prison here.

7The ghetto is first of all in the mind, when it is only a refuge, a niche of intimate interests and collective passions. But at the same time, in the suburban bistros, what do the young people of the cities dream of together? What do they talk about if not beautiful getaways? Get away from it all, find the way to a place in the sun? The paradox of the ghetto lies precisely in this permanent oscillation between an attempt to flee outside the walls to save one’s skin, and a return to the walls to save one’s soul. Because to stay is to bury oneself, to accept one’s fate. But to leave is always to betray and to be abandoned. Unfortunately, it too often confines itself to this permanent back and forth, the world of the suburbs, to this hesitation-waltz which borders on social emptiness, so much that it denotes an inability to organize the inside and the outside. An identity must be opened to the outside in order to remain alive because isolation, withdrawal, only reproduces an already experienced regime which turns to violence by repeating itself. When the exterior appears as a permanent threat, any form of overcoming an original violence of things becomes impossible to humanize, impossible to relativize in social ties. The environment is then experienced as a total social fact. And we carry it as the weight of the world, as a curse, as an original sin. This is how domination makes the excluded people bear the weight of their exclusion in a reproduction of social violence that confuses the inside and the outside. Violence repeats an original condition, and no social mediation, no institution, no symbolic mastery can compensate for this submission to the decor.

City of the Poor and the Ethnic City

Extract 11 Bahia: I have the impression that the Maghrebian population has taken up a lot of spaces in Givors, that therefore it has grown, but that there is nothing to make people busy. And therefore, the people who sell drugs in the end, I understand them. Because if in the end they can’t find a job, they can’t find anything, in the end, they still have to pay their rent and help their parents. […] When you see that your parents are struggling, you only want to help them, and you’re ready for anything! […] So, you are indoctrinated by the older! They say, “Come help me and I will give you your share.”

Extract 12 Bahia: And in fact, those whom I consider French are those who also manage to cope financially […] It seems that it is my father who is of Spanish origin and my mother of North African origin. Because, my mother, she grew up here! In fact, I really feel that the Maghreb side has included Givors and established its rules in Givors.

8Bahia remains very ambiguous in her way of distinguishing the social and the ethnic, and this ambiguity is found in the term “rats”—in reference to a form of self-designation of young people in suburbs—which she uses to speak of “street youth,” dealers, storytellers, pissers, “in tracksuits and sneakers,” strangers to the rules of social normality. If they are often heirs to immigration, there would also be “rich rats” and “people who are not of North African origin and who can be defined as rats.” These comments from Bahia’s narration remind me of a questionable heritage among the “cousins”—a form of self-designation of immigrants of Algerian origin—from Saint-Chamond (Loire). The “cousinhood” is justified from childhood by theoretical drafts. Ready-made answers to concrete situations. Reconsidered formulas summarizing the world in a few words. But from adolescence explicit “cousin” theories which differed from established traditions are enacted. In the long term, the quality of a cousin escapes family ties, and it is no longer a question of being born a cousin but of becoming one. Beyond a vision of the “cousin district” as an enclave of immigrant identity, the experience of the heirs is thus a creator of forms of expression and languages ​​which are all ways of identifying and understanding each other between people from the same world. The symbolic universe of the big family of young cousins ​​is crystallized through a shared memory, like a succession of generations with overlapping territories without being mixed, from the district of childhood games to the multiple areas of reconstruction of the “cousin city.”

9But to return to Bahia, her confusions between the social and the ethnic enlighten us more on a situation of ethnicization of social relations in Givors—a situation where the Maghreb dimension no longer simply covers cultural difference but also, and above all, a hegemony of marginalized populations in front of other wealthier Givordins, who, if they are seen as “French,” can also be of foreign origin.