Abstract

Urban action is ordinary action, like the old man who persists in living on the Champs-Élysées. Urban action finds itself in contradiction with urban politics, as understood by the left, which organises resistance against evictions, when it is too late. What is this city that resists? A sense of it can be given, parenthetically, between the icons of modern architecture and the informal Turkish shantytown huts of the 1950s, which inspired a whole theatre having as public the middle classes, who welcomed old squatters into their midst : President Erdogan himself lived in one of these huts! But now there are new refugees arriving from other countries who do not have this peripepheral space in which to build their own lives