Le périurbain, terre d’engagement des classes moyennes : retour critique sur « “Et tout, le monde, déteste la métropole ?” Entretien avec la critique sociale »

Published alongside the special issue Contester la métropole, the collective interview “Hey hey, ho ho, metropolis has got to go?” focuses on urban social movements fighting metropolises and the process of metropolization. This paper discusses this collective interview from a peri-urban perspective – with a particular focus on the section about protests outside metropolises. In that section, the authors relay the dominant images of peri-urban areas and imply there is no political engagement in these spaces. They also express a vision unattuned to existing forms of peri-urban political engagement. This paper aims to contribute to a better knowledge of peri-urban spaces; in order to do so, it attempts to deconstruct the generic representations of peri-urban areas which appear in the interview. It thus provides details on the socio-spatial categorisation of peri-urban areas in France, which is often oversimplified. It also shows that alongside cities, peri-urban spaces are sites of middle-class political engagement, and reveals the diversity of forms this engagement takes.