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Once a center of mining and industrial activity throughout several centuries, the Ondaine Valley, between Saint-Etienne and Firminy, remains today marked by traces of the industrialization that shaped the territory, especially in regards to its coal mining history. Despite a period of mourning beginning in the late 1970s, local actors still have difficulties taking mining heritage into account within their territorial reconversion policies. Primarily composed of three cities with populations fluctuating between 8,000 and 16,000 inhabitants, the Ondaine Valley gives us a view of a territory in which three different "projects" are expressed in terms of mining heritage management. The landscape is thus the expression of these "projects", considering the mining heritage as an element that contributes to the construction of an imaginary, which is also a resource to be exploited and sometimes a story to be forgotten in favor of another narrative of the territory.

Continuing work on the links between tourism and spatiality, this text supports the thesis that we have entered a new era beyond the “recreational turn”. Now there would no longer be mere interdependent relations and tensions between urbanisation and tourism: man would inhabit the world as a tourist. Any urban space would be designed by and for tourism; any act of urban and/or architectural planning would aim to produce the conditions for a relationship with the world based on entertainment. To defend this thesis, a double study of the Voyage à Nantes and Confluences-Lyon, as emblematic illustrations of this new era, and of literature on contemporary spatialities, where urbanity, tourism, urban production and inhabiting are entangled, will be mobilised.

To attract the investors for whom they compete in the urban market, cities aim after making themselves desirable for national and global capital seeking locations to increase profitability. Thus, they work to improve their brand image. For this purpose, they value, on the one hand, their singularities, i.e. the present or under development features that distinguish them, and, on the other hand, their conformity to the dominant values ​​of the discourses on the "cities that matter", which means, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, being sustainable, beautiful, festive, patrimonial, festive, innovative or socially mixed. Like Confluence in Lyon, major urban and architectural projects are nowadays precious tools for changing or renovating the image of a city by responding to this dual objective of conformity and singularity. By analyzing interviews with planners, developers, urbanists and architects from Confluence, we show that the image change and the images, which are based on the singularity/conformity pair, have consequences on the socio-spatial structure of both this new district and the surrounding area, Sainte-Blandine. Some inhabitants are legitimized because they correspond to the targeted population and they appropriate this image as much as they participate in formulating it. Unlike them, some are excluded from this image and their presence is finally undesirable in this area of ​​Lyon and, by extension, throughout its entire downtown.

This text, clearly focus on the universe of individuals practices sense bases on the hypothesis that adaptation is the process used in the face of durability (french translation of sustainability). Everybody negotiates with it sown values according to the situation in which it is and which it represents itself. Using a quantitative approach (a measure of the movements) and a qualitative one (an interview that put people in front of the cartographic reality of their mobility via a logger-GPS) allows us to reach the justifications of practices. These are analyzed in the ell of the durability and the status that is confer to it by the investigated people, between standards, practical theory or new labels of former practices. Two modes of negotiation are so highlighted: the conciliation between the individuals values and their implementation “in practice”; the compensation between practices which do not answer the values and the others who answer it, allowing a globally positive intuitive balance assessment of the least acceptable for people. By the way, relationship with durability is sketched through five behavioral figures.

Since the 1970s, social and environmental contestations became were gradually institutionalized as injunctions to participatory democracy and sustainable city. When urban social movements were carrying an aspiration to "politicize" urban issues, what about present institutionalized frameworks of participation and inhabitant mobilizations? This paper proposes to deal with this issue through analyzing the discourses of designers and inhabitants of two eco-neighborhoods in Lyon and Nantes. We explore the challenges and limitations of the politicization – understood as rise in conflictuality and rise in generality – of urban issues in two modalities of "participation".