Motives and Resources of Sociology of Urban Experience
Knowledge of the urban experience, if it is primarily a microsociology, has interests that go well beyond, including the questioning tone of public spaces, the performances of urban facilities and devices. This paper is somehow its unearthing while on the one hand, the academic context has tended to segment the urban knowledge and that of other, contemporary metropolisation has jeopardize the figure (often imagined) of the city centered, bounded and diverse, expressive. The first part of the text discusses the characteristics of the sociology of the urban experience ; the second shows the challenge to understand the equipments that support this experience from the case of the public bench and belvedere ; the third questions the resources we can have to understand the contemporary context of the decentred city, without taking homogeneous and disparaging visions that experts often tend to build towards about it. Finally, is the question of the sociological perspective that is asked and of some methods that we can use for not to abandon an interpellation of urban research against management practices, from design to landscape. If the challenge of the text is firstly theoretical, it is not without questions in the field of production and of the intentional transformation of the built spaces.