TOUR OF THE HABITAT WORLD SEEN BY CIVIL SOCIETY

Balkanization

Dernière mise à jour le 4 septembre 2019

« The act of balkanizing, the act of balkanizing. »

Balkanize:

  • « To divide a territorial or political entity into autonomous states in order to take advantage of the divisions thus created. »
  • « Splitting an institution, an administration and making it inefficient. »
    Source: « Le Petit Larousse »

The term balkanization has its origins in the history of the Balkans (territory of Greece, Albania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Turkey,…). This term meant political destructuring. A synonym of Balkanization is fragmentation. By fragmentation, we mean the dissociation of urban space and social cohesion:

« Fragmentation is a process of breaking up a space object considered as carrying a social unit. Fragmentation is not the only term used to describe this phenomenon: in the 1990s, many related terms were used: balkanization, archipelization, social fracture, secession, dualisation, segregation, segmentation, socio-spatial polarization. The question of fragmentation raises the question of the social and political link in metropolitan societies. » > see also urban apartheid

« Françoise Navez Bouchanine proposes two families of interpretation of fragmentation: social and urban. Social fragmentation is a « process of collective disintegration or disaffiliation that would lead to the grouping, by assignment or voluntary action, of individuals forming communities of a variable type, but carrying a recognized common identity, whatever its origin – social, cultural, ethnic, religious… – in these appropriate spaces in an exclusive way, spaces where the absence of reference to urban society as a whole would therefore be expressed ». Françoise Navez-Bouchanine distinguishes two currents that address social fragmentation: the first is fuelled by a philosophical debate on the appreciation of the transformations of cultures and societies, either in the perspective of a radicalized modernity or in that of the transition from modernity to post-modernity. The second argues in favour of the recent effects of economic transformations, particularly globalisation. For the fragmentation of the urban form Françoise Navez Bouchanine distinguishes three forms of urban fragmentation: the fragmentation of the urban form such as the privatization of public spaces and urban sprawl, the socio-spatial fragmentation which concerns more directly the interactions between the social and the spatial and the political or managerial fragmentation (multiplication of political and administrative scales; the disengagement of the State…) »

Source dph: http://base.d-p-h.info/fr/fiches/dph/fiche-dph-8297.html