Jean-Pierre Frey, Families, social economy and housing urbanity The aim of the employers' intervention in housing at Creusot, lost its impact of normalisation in the face of the employees own forms of urbanity. For the foreign manual workers the right to propagate on the spot remains refused. When a production cycle is shorter than a generation the workers and their families are condemned to fall back on their own intimacy.

Le Creusot. Entrepreneurial city design. The analysis of projects conceived by an industrial entrepreneurship and its technical departments help us to understand the specific action of a subject in the history of a town. Le Creusot has the advantage of having been formed and produced according to entrepreneurial options directly connected with the aims of industrialisation and without an urban space conceived prior to the industrial implantations. It does not mean that we must consider that the standards of living, the architectural typology, the urban morphology are only indebted to entrepreneurial action, but the actions made on space according to the general lines of the entrepreneurship show such a degree of coherence that in the realizations and projects we can see some logics in this action as well as the contradictions with which it was in conflict. The author first studies the modalities of action on space (the architecture according to a special typology) of a historical subject. The head figure must not be included. It is anonymus architecture in so far as no famous architect signed any project. On the contrary, architectural conception comes from the work of specialized teams of which it will be necessary to define the field of proficiency and the brinds of training. The identification of technical authors of the building contracting with obviously a distribution of skills between architects and engineers is important for the history of social housing. So we can think of going beyond the vision of an architecture defined only by the knowledge of building techniques or comfort, the only economical conditions of its production, of going beyond the conception of the modalities of action of architectural forms on space according to an autonomous logic. The second part of Jean-Pierre Frey' s analysis addresses this last point. In it, he shows the links between the social-professional status of the workers and the creation of urban space in so far as decisions made concerning urban configuration influence social configurations. The entire corpus utilized takes on meaning only with respect to what the ruling class considers as the life style and. habitus of the different categories of employees. The types chosen do not correspond exactly to these habitus or adhere scrupulously to the demands of the various sectors of the population according to their degree of urbanisation (which is what property acquisition housing projects and contracting performed by the inhabitants themselves criticized ). The organization of housing into types was justified by the avowed desire of the entrepreneurship to influence social relationships. The large place afforded to the relationship between the intérieur and exterieur of housing in the analysis of the types is justified by the fact that intermediary spaces, which take on great significance indetermining these types, play a fundamental role in the meaning of the differences of the inhabitant's social status. Indeed, if one compares the conception of architectural types with the urbanisation process induced by industrialisation in a rural milieu, it is possible to hypothesize that the principal elements in the existing symbolic architectural configuration of the Le Creusot habitat (as is likely to also be the case of all industrial zones conceived along the some historical directives) are made up of urban differential signs in the relations between the domestic space of the housing units (considered as cells) and the public space, by enlargement of intermediary spaces between the street and front door, according to a subtile play of social differentiation, as a function of the socioprofessional status of the groups of inhabitants. A very stylistic esthetics of formal architecture, where the traditional forms of rural housing would have, at the end of the 19th Century, bowed the signes of urban development binded to the status of the inhabitant with respect to industrial production and the localization of the habitat in the urban morphology with respect to centers of urbanization. The entrepreneurial conception of types would have thus parcelled out distinctif signs of the inhabitants status through a certain number of distinguishing elements, formal characteristics of architectural types. By analyzing architectural types, it is possible to discern the historical conception of both the architecture and the social configuration of the entrepreneurship : for the first time, for the needs of industrial production and for its profit, it has made architecture the chief means of its policy making, and social-economic «program» ; it thus attempts to combine architectural elements with economic and social criteria which allow for the designation of its factory employees.

En application de la loi « dite Cornudet » (du 19 mars 1919 et actualisée en 1924) prescrivant l’établissement de plans d’aménagement, d’embellissement et d’extension (PAEE), la Ville d’Oran fit appel à la Société des plans régulateurs de villes des frères et fils Danger dès la fin des années 1920. Associés pour cette occasion à l’architecte oranais Wollf, ces urbanistes élaborent des documents présentant un intérêt manifeste non seulement pour suivre l’évolution des grands traits de cette agglomération mais aussi pour mieux comprendre les raisonnements, méthodes et moyens envisagés pour appliquer aux départements d’Outre,mer une législation faite avant tout pour la métropole. C’est ce PAEE que Gaston Bardet, autre architecte,urbaniste de renom, eut à charge d’actualiser en 1948.L’auteur s’attache à mieux faire connaître ces personnages représentatifs d’un urbanisme qu’on a pu dire « culturaliste », à travers une analyse qui a le souci de rendre compte de l’attention portée alors aux morphologies urbaines et sociales, en particulier aux relations entre les divers types de population selon qu’elles furent considérées comme européennes ou indigènes.

En partant de l'exemple de l'Algérie, pays en voie d'urbanisation accélérée, l'auteur analyse les possibilités de dépassement d'une des contradictions majeures de la production de l'habitat qui fait obstacle à l'apparition d' une morphologie urbaine en môme temps bien équipée et susceptible de traduire les caractéristiques culturelles de l'usage de l'espace dans ce pays. Les logements produits par les entreprises publiques bénéficient des travaux d'infrastructure et d'équipement qui garantissent le confort (minimal) de l'habitation, mais souffrent de la normalisation bureaucratique des plans et du simplisme de la conception urbanistique. L'habitat autoconstruit, qui par ailleurs pallie le manque d'efficacité de l'action de l'Etat en la matière, mais en dehors des normes et de la légalité, présente l'avantage de mieux traduire les caractéristiques et les profondes mutations de l'évolution des modes de vie des divers groupes sociaux, mais, les équipements, les infrastructures et la coordination urbanistique des opérations lui font cruellement défaut. L'occasion nous est ainsi offerte de reconsidérer les parts respectives que peuvent jouer, dans de nouvelles modalités de production et de formalisation de l'espace, les maîtrises d'ouvrages et d'œuvres architecturales ou urbaines selon une nouvelle pertinence de leurs objets respectifs.

Réflexion sémantique sur l'origine et la polysémie du terme «lotissement» dont l'aspect urbanistique est relativement récent, cette introduction souligne aussi l'ambivalence du mot qui désigne à la fois l'acte de lotir (souvent escamoté dans les études) et le résultat de cette opération. Les lotissements, qui apparaissent tantôt comme lieu privilégié d'un certain consensus social, tantôt au contraire comme lieu de conflits, occupent en tout cas sûrement une place centrale dans la constitution du nouveau type de configuration urbaine qui se dessine aujourd'hui.