Article by Zohar Cherbit: «Review. Jean-Stéphane Borja, Street Corner Democracy. Ethnographie politique d'un processus de rénovation urbaine à Marseille (La Bibliothèque de Pragmata, 2025)» (Esprit Critique)
Zohar Cherbit, Review. Jean-Stéphane Borja, Street Corner Democracy. Political ethnography of an urban renewal process in Marseille (The Pragmata Library, 2025), Critical thinking notebook, September 2025. https://espritcritique.hypotheses.org/5233
Extract:
30 July 2025, La Provence publishes an article entitled «Rue de la République in Marseille: after the rent strike, worrying cracks», with the subtitle «The many shopkeepers on rue de la République in Marseille (2e), deplore both the high rents and the alarming state of the buildings». Around the rue de la République, the issue of rents, the state of the buildings and the difficulty of establishing a permanent retail presence is a recurring one.
J.-S. Borja (2025) traces the urban transformations of the Rue de la République over a long period of time, criss-crossed by social mobilisations that struggle to fuel a public problem - once it has been constructed. Through an ethnographic investigation lasting several years, the author reveals the areas of friction, uncertainty and fragility that run through the life of a public problem in a non-linear fashion, and above all the people who make up the heterogeneous «public» concerned.
