Rational: Despite the development of unofficialy occupied living-places ("squats") in France and Europe, there is a lack of scientific data concerning these invisible living situations and precarious housing conditions that are difficult to reach. Hypotheses: People living in unofficialy occupied places in the city of Marseille are numerous and heterogeneous, combining complex life and health histories with precarious and risky living conditions. Objectives: This project is co-constructed by associations and community organizations, involved people, public authorities and scientific laboratorie. It aims to estimate the population of people living in squats in the city and to describe their pathways. The main objective is to understand their living conditions, to identify barriers and levers to access to essential social and health services, and to characterize existing resources and empowerment strategies. Methodology: The project will use a mixed, participatory and community-based methodology with: 1) a quantitative part using Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) and a questionnaire survey (n=400) associated with the capture/recapture method and; 2) a qualitative part based on semi-structured interviews (n=30), focus groups and observations with the use of mind mapping. Expected results: This cross-analysis of statistical and empirical data aims to improve understanding of the situations of people living in squats, and to propose targeted actions to reduce risks and vulnerabilities and empower residents. The results of the triangulation and integration of quantitative and qualitative data will be discussed with all project partners, and will be the subject of scientific publications and presentations to the different stakeholders - institutional, community, associative and academic. This interdisciplinary and intersectoral (science-society) project is in line with the major priority issues of INSERM (Public Health), CNRS (Health and Environment) and INSHS (Shared Sciences and Experimental Approaches in SHS).

There is a resurgence of interest in how the distribution of propertied assets affects economic and social phenomena, in a context of rising wealth inequalities, and of increasingly flexible fiscal and planning regimes. We propose to extend the study of the political economy of land by undertaking a comparative assessment of the socio-legal embeddedness of land markets in France and Luxembourg, through two case studies: the urban areas of Aix-Marseille and Luxembourg. The DISTRILAND project will analyse how the intersections of historical landownership patterns, regulatory regimes and institutional structures impact a range of outcomes, including housing production and urban and spatial planning. While closely interlinked, France and Luxembourg diverge with respect to a number of underlying conditions: the concentration of landownership, the fiscal treatment of land and the legal treatment of property. In Luxembourg, both an industrial and a financial revolution have occurred over a land surface whose structure of ownership has remained very concentrated since the 19th century. In the absence of sustained intervention by public bodies in land markets, and of low taxes on property and inheritances, access to land has grown to become one of the central political issues in the country. In France, despite a greater degree of land regulation, local governments have contributed for decades to a progressive privatisation of land reserves in order to meet housing demand and to capture economic resources. The recent context of austerity urbanism has further reduced their financial leeway and has led to the sale of public land. The socio-legal embeddedness of land markets calls into question the capacity of local governments to regulate land uses. The DISTRILAND project would be the first comparative investigation of landownership patterns. It will draw on a mixed-methods approach that combines large-scale micro-level data sources with interviews with key stakeholders, with the potential to inform land and fiscal policies at the international scale. The project’s main objective is to empirically generate a typology of landowners that takes into account both land wealth portfolios and land-related strategies, captured through land value chains (using land registry data and property transactions) and interviews. The DISTRILAND project aims to reconstruct how the commodification and financialisation of land affects urban development, and seeks to inform public policy on how to best respond to contemporary landowner strategies, be they centred on conservation (i.e. land hoarding) or transformation (i.e. property development).

PROCIT is a project backed by an international, multidisciplinary network around the topic of “Local identities in the Mediterranean” and is intended to explore the theme of citizenship from the perspective of property and the rights pertaining thereto. It will focus on the modern era. This project is intended as a contribution to research on processes of social integration and the nature of the socio-economic and legal inequalities that determine the direction of that integration and are, simultaneously, its products. Two decisions in particular characterize this project: the decision to deal with the connected dimensions of citizenship, integration, and inequalities in the longue durée history of Mediterranean societies (from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries); and the decision to situate these themes in a deliberately comparative perspective, on the basis of research carried out in Europe, North Africa, Palestine, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire. The eighteenth scholars working together on the PROCIT project are from institutions rooted in these different countries. Together, they can already boast a shared experience of work and collaboration. The notion of citizenship considered in this project does not refer to the formal political prerogatives of which nation-state members can avail themselves, but rather to the set of rights to which one has access as a result of acknowledged belonging to a particular place. These rights conferred by belonging, in the societies we wish to analyze, are the point of origin of differential access to resources (such as the market, property, credit, work, charity, etc.), which structure the social scale. The term “citizenship” thus refers to a status where access rights to resources encounter the social recognition of these rights as well as the ability to claim them. Our research is thus focused on the processes that have produced this status in different societies north and south of the Mediterranean. In this project, property has appeared as a fundamental variable shared by different societies. In modern societies, the notion of property refers to a vast semantic field, which cannot be reduced to material wealth alone. Differential access to property rights not only outlines economic hierarchies or symbolic primacies; it also creates prerogatives that occupy individuals more broadly. In a wide range of cases, the condition of “citizen” or subject of a central authority is closely linked to the recognition of one’s capacity to access property or to transmit it. In modern societies of the northern and southern Mediterranean, relations to things create social statuses, relations, and ties, and grant access to rights related to belonging. The ability to exercise property rights traces the outline of local communities, and, as a result, of wider territorial communities. Access to property, in that sense, is an essential phase in every process of social integration. This major investigation into citizenship in the northern and southern Mediterranean requires painstaking comparative analysis. The comparison implemented here avoids culturalism entirely and is based on reasoned, methodologically informed empiricism. It will explore an original method, based on sources. This method must allow us to grasp practice as closely as possible to the documentary systems that shape and show them. This will allow the researchers to build a relevant questionnaire and explanatory framework together. This method requires close coordination among scholars, who will choose among three thematic axes: access to the market; creating trusts (“off-market” goods); and finally, wealth transmission practices. Two historians specialized in each theme in the northern and southern Mediterranean will coordinate each axis and organize the comparative work.

The BIPULUM project aims to identify and study the public libraries existing in France in the 18th century, from the perspective of urban history, political history, and the history of cultural practices. It aims to understand how emerges, even before the Revolution, the idea of the library as a “public service”. In the kingdom, nearly fifty towns had a public library at the end of the 18th century, that is, libraries open to an undifferentiated public, without considering the legal status of the collection, which may depend on a city, an academy, an university or an ecclesiastical community. Led by Emmanuelle Chapron, professor of Early Modern History and professor of Book History at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the project is based on a partnership between the UMR 7303 Telemme (Aix Marseille University, CNRS), the UMR 5713 IHRIM (Lyon II, CNRS), the Centre Jean-Mabillon (École Nationale des Chartes) and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. By adopting an overall and comparative perspective, associating researchers, librarians, and archivists, we will try to understand the role of these institutions in the cultural and political evolutions in progress. We don’t claim to affirm that these institutions were key places of the Enlightenment (which they were probably not, or at least not all of them), but we make the hypothesis that they were part of crucial cultural changes, by establishing a public reading space in the heart of the city. Three aspects will be carefully considered: the moment of the foundation considered as a political project; the way in which a “public service” was developed and daily experienced, at a time when (if not the syntagm, as least) its idea was emerging; the identity of the public (traditionally overlooked in the history of libraries) and the uses they made of the collections. The project aims to produce an online instrument (with Heurist), enriched with new documents on the history of ancient libraries. Local, comparative, and global research will be collectively confronted and published. Valorisation and open science activities, developed in partnership with the libraries, will include exhibitions, video presentations of the project, visits and conferences. By taking advantage of the public's interest in the history of objects, places and collections and their heritage value, the project will connect researchers, professionals and users around a shared object, the public library.

Many memory institutions across Europe contain holdings connected with its colonial past which for many years has been a focus of contestation from both communities of origin, ethnic minorities and civil society at large. At the same time challenging questions are being asked by professionals in the field as to what to do with this problematic cultural heritage, from returning items when appropriate, to rewriting the historical context surrounding them in a more critical and inclusive way. This project aims to identify key instances of colonial audio-visual heritage across the three archives involved, draw a common map of shared racialised representations connected with their respective imperial contexts, identify problematic visualisation and language and open up a dialogue between the archives and a variety of users, including archivists, researchers, filmmakers, and grassroots organisations. The digitised colonial audio-visual heritage is provided by three national archives: The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the French Institut national de l'audiovisuel and Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK. All these archives have a rich collection of original film and sound, some of it produced at the height of empire, ranging from ethnographers' footage for 'educational' purposes to more direct propaganda films to bolster colonial ideologies. We will explore how archival material created in a ‘colonial mindset’ can be re-appropriated and re-interpreted critically to become an effective source for the 'decolonization of the mind' and the basis for a future inclusive society. The overall outcome of PICCH is to engender a polyvocality that can be incorporated into the archive itself providing new ways to enter and explore the past via a contemporary interpretative frame. To this effect advanced technologies will be used to study how to bridge archival and contemporary languages, and to support transnational exploration of multiple archives via a single interactive user interface.