• 1 Special issue « La fabrique des lieux », Genèses n°40, 2000/3, p. 2.
• 2 Dupront A., « Au commencement, un mot : lieu », Hauts Lieux : une quête de racines, de sacré, de sy (...)

‘We inhabit our places as if nothing had happened,’ remarked sociologist Yvon Lamy in the introduction to an issue of the journal Genèses devoted 20 years ago to the “Fabrique des lieux”1. Yet places have always, with varying degrees of interest and commitment, embodied cities and the people who live in them, invested or deprived, indiscriminately, by mayors and councillors with a political dimension, by residents and city dwellers with a social dimension, by urban actors and professionals with an economic and symbolic dimension, and so on. ‘A simple word that reaches so far is the semantic destiny of ‘place’ and the silent power of its secret...’2, wrote historian Alphonse Baudelaire. wrote the historian Alphonse Dupront about places. For researchers working in urban areas, places represent the past and future of cities through new architectural, aesthetic and heritage forms. Their ethnography provides information about the distribution of social groups in urban spaces and the ways in which they are invested, occupied or distanced. Producing places means constructing a territory, sociologically, spatially and symbolically.

• 3 De Certeau M., L'invention du quotidien, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 173.
• 4 Nora P. (dir.), Les lieux de mémoire (note 1), II, Paris, Gallimard, Quarto, 1997, p. 2226.
• 5 Norberg-Schulz C., Genius loci, Paris, Eyrolles, 1981.
• 6 Perec G., Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, Paris, Christian Bourgeois, 1982.

In this favourable context, from the 1980s onwards, place gradually became a subject of study, worthy of interest. In his research on L'invention du quotidien (The Invention of Everyday Life), the transdisciplinary philosopher Michel de Certeau gave it a prominent place, distinguishing it from space: ‘A place is therefore an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability [...] Space would be to place what a word becomes when it is spoken, that is, when it is seized in the ambiguity of an effectuation, transformed into a term subject to multiple conventions, posited as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations due to successive neighbourhoods. Unlike place, then, it has neither univocity nor the stability of a proper. In short, space is a practised place’3. Place is a way of occupying or inhabiting a space. For the historian Pierre Nora, in his study on Places of Memory, it is also a way of signifying, recounting and representing it: he defines ‘any significant unit, of a material or ideal order, which the will of men or the work of time has made a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community’4. So, from this perspective, place is a link and a good analyzer of society. Following the example of these scientific works, but also of architectural5 or literary6 writings aimed at exploring all its aspects, place is gradually emerging, especially among geographers, as a relevant unit of observation and as an efficient entry point for analysing space.

• 7 Lévy J. et Lussault M., Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés, Paris, Belin, 20 (...)
• 8 Lévy J. et Lussault M., Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés, Paris, Belin, 20 (...)
• 9 Debarbieux B., « Le lieu, fragment et symbole du territoire ? », Espaces et sociétés, n° 80A, 1995, (...)
• 10 Gravari-Barbas M. et Violier P., Lieux de culture, culture des lieux, Production(s) culturelle(s) l (...)
• 11 Berque A. (dir.), Logique du lieu et dépassement de la modernité, Volume I : Nishida : La mouvance (...)
• 12 Brochot A. et De La Soudière M., « Pourquoi le lieu ? », Communications, vol. 87, no. 2, 2010, p. 5

After being sidelined in favour of more consensual concepts such as space or territory, geographers are now mobilising place as the ‘smallest complex spatial unit of society’7 and as the ‘basic space of social life’8, whose heuristic value lies in its ability to reveal the dynamics at work in the functioning of territories. Thus, for some, place is becoming (or re-emerging) as a relevant level for understanding the spatial construction of identities9, the production of heritage and the emergence of cultures on a local scale10, or for analysing the processes at work in the development of contemporary societies in terms of their relationship with space11. Its many and varied uses within the social sciences blur its definitions, which can be discerned according to disciplinary themes and areas of investigation: ‘The 1990s also saw an “explosion” in the use of this multifaceted and multi-purpose concept. Place flourished, it was everywhere, used for everything and by everyone’12.

• 13 See in particular : « Dans l’organisation des sociétés humaines, existe-t-il un ‘effet de lieu’ ? O (...)
• 14 See in particular (but not exhaustively) : Chamboredon J.-Cl., Lemaire M. « Proximité spatiale et d (...)

Social geography13, and even more so sociology14, have also made a major contribution to reconsidering space as an element that plays an active part in social structuring, and not just as a material framework within which social relations are played out. Place, as a spatial scale, thus becomes the medium or means of expression of social relationships, perceptible by others; each space can qualify those who inhabit or frequent it, ‘consecrating’ or ‘symbolically degrading’ the residents or occupants. Place plays a part in the social status and social distribution of individuals. It is therefore one of the ways in which collective identities are affirmed and social positions in space are asserted.

• 15 See in particular : « Autour du lieu », Special Issue, Communications, 2010/2 (n° 87) ; Augé M., «  (...)
• 16 Micoud A. (éd.), Des Hauts-Lieux. La Construction Sociale de l'Exemplarité, CNRS Éditions, 1991 ; A (...)

While some argue that a ‘return to place’ is needed to investigate cities15, others point to a growing interest in place within contemporary social, heritage and urban policies16. What is interesting to observe through these correspondences is that place very often appears as a field of research at the very moment when it is mobilised by social actors to say something about the city or to support a political and urban project.

• 17 These questions are raised in a number of pepers, seminars and colloquia on the subject of places : (...)

Place - and the processes of localisation - is considered here as an object of study. Our aim is to explore the heuristic value of ‘making place’, as part of a debate between disciplines and disciplinary fields, by observing the way in which this process is willingly mobilised by researchers in the humanities and social sciences, in their problematics and their research fields17. A number of avenues for reflection and field research will be presented and considered, like a kaleidoscope of urban places and situations.