Histoire et quartiers. Méthodes, narrations, acteurs.

In recent years, the history of neighborhoods has attracted a renewed interest with regard to urban policy investigations and their qualitative objectives, thus experiencing a return to human scale, to proximity, and to the “15-minute city.” A resurgence of historical engagement occurs from various directions and within different domains, such as habitat and housing, neighborhood facilities, employment, mobility, and neighbor relations. These new perspectives question several scales (local, national, transnational, global) by seeing neighborhoods as places where construction practices and spatial representation intersect at different levels. This issue on “Histories and neighborhoods” develops along the lines of two approaches: methodological and epistemological aspects, as well as research strategies (1), and the construction and uses of narratives with actors in specific urban contexts (2). It is interested in the ways in which these questions are addressed in different political contexts and scientific milieux. Over the past ten years, in the fields of urban history, architecture and landscape, and in urban sectors more specifically, we have witnessed attempts at interdisciplinary hybridization between research practices, methodologies and tools that come from different disciplinary backgrounds: archival research, ethnography, history written by public institutions, oral history, and field observations. These methodological dialogues go beyond cleavages between quantitative and qualitative research, subjective or objective observation, micro and macro-history, or architectural typology and uses of space. Indeed, these research approaches make it possible to develop interplays of scale, from the micro to the macro, from a domestic setting to the territory, and from everyday actors to structural, institutional or even political actors. Which research strategies are at work? What types of narratives do they produce? How does opening up to the field of representations and identities of local groups integrate social interactions into the analysis of spatial and structural logics? In addition to interview excerpts, as well as graphic, audible and pictorial documents, what types of materials are used? Finally, to what extent is architectural, urban and landscape research well positioned to develop new forms of methodological hybridization? These approaches also lead to different cross-referencing of research topics, and to multiple definitions of the notion of “neighborhood,” the implications of which are explored in this issue. Neighborhood histories can also be perceived as the result of a negotiation in which historians find themselves coproducing interpretations within the framework of a dialogue with narratives developed on different stages, particularly political ones, and carried out by actors with varied objectives and forms of communication. The issue questions the positioning of research as it faces an abundance of diachronic narratives already layered on neighborhoods, part of which do not circulate in academic literature, but rather through forms of oral or written transmission conveyed by political, administrative, professional, associative, and resident networks, etc. We will also focus on the “demand for history”, from the part of planners and other social groups, and on the need to develop historical accounts capable of addressing the questions about the transformation of space, but also on the risk of producing timeless, fictitious or “presentist” spaces. From this perspective, we can question historical research integrating a participatory research methodology and assembling non-academic forms of narration and representation. This will raise questions relating to the coordination of narratives and memories, the contribution of testimonies to the archive and, more broadly, the layering of narratives. In this framework, and in the face of memorial and heritage groups and their tools, the contribution of the architect, urban planner or landscape architect is approached in the production of a common or consolidated history, or even of history as a common good, simultaneously capable of integrating a plurality of perspectives, even potentially conflicting ones. Without revisiting debates on the notion of neighborhood, already thoroughly addressed in the social sciences, and without seeking to establish a universal definition, the issue questions the way in which historiography takes hold of this notion. As such, the diversity of case studies makes it possible to understand how the historical narrative captures the scales of the “neighborhood” in different contexts.