Re-Dimensioning Urban Decline from the Perspective of Weakening Popular “Habitabilité” in the “Bassin Minier Du Nord-Pas-De-Calais"
They highlighted that the closing of coalmining triggered a material and symbolic reconfiguration of this territorial construct which challenges the "traditional" running of local lifestyles and local people’s multidimensionally limited capabilities of adaptation. This growing misalignment between “habitat” and “habiter” (Lévy and Lussault, 2013) weakens the capacity of the vulnerable working-class populations to turn the restructuring arrangement of their local space into resources of action (Stock, 2015), thus co-contributing to the weakening of their already socio-economically strained sustaining strategies (Fol, 2009).
The systemic nature of this issue of “in-habitabilité” (Lévy and Lussault, 2013) tends to highlight a structural dynamic of urban decline in post-industrial/mining areas which is yet overlooked by the literature on "left-behind places". I formulate the hypothesis that this analytical "blind spot" stems from the "modèle partitionnel" (Volvey et al., 2021) of this research field, which, far from considering the "spatial question" as a genuine co-explanatory dimension of decline phenomena, continues to grasp it as the study of the translation/distribution “dans l’espace" (Lussault and Stock, 2010) of more fundamental socio-economic dynamics (e.g., Fol et al., 2014).
The empirical highlight and theoretical formalization of this new spatial issue open up a new dimensional (Volvey et al., 2021) contribution to the study of the structural dynamics of "left-behind places". In this communication, I propose to set out: (1) the empirical foundations of this issue of “(in-)habitabilité”; (2) its contributions to the more general analysis of "left-behind places"; (3) and the perspectives opened by its new empirical testing in the coal mining areas of Lorraine and Nord-Pas-de-Calais.