Based on an ethnography of the mobilization against the EuropaCity shopping center, Stéphane Tonnelat sheds light on contemporary forms of environmental commitment. The work unfolds the reasons to oppose the artificialization of land and analyzes the ordinary sources of these struggles.
In this work, Stéphane Tonnelat offers a long-term ethnography of the mobilization against the development of the Triangle de Gonesse between 2017 and 2026. Through the analysis of the life of a collective opposed to the EuropaCity project and, more broadly, to the artificialization of agricultural land in Val-d’Oise, the author is part of a now well-established field of work devoted to environmental mobilizations and local planning conflicts. He conducts a general reflection on contemporary forms of collective action, activist careers – even once a victory has been obtained – and sheds light, beyond the case of the Triangle de Gonesse, on the disputes and conflicts around so-called planning projects. The artificialization of land is often understood through quantitative indicators, according to which the equivalent of a French department would be swallowed up by concrete every ten years. The work allows us to materially understand its consequences: disappearance of agricultural operations, breakdowns in transmissions, but also resistance to the planning machine. Gonesse’s struggle aims to protect 700 hectares of cereal land, wedged between the Bourget and Roissy airports, against a project deemed ecologically and socially aberrant, which promises a ski slope, shopping center and digital flows. These peri-urban lands, a little ugly » and noisy, appear throughout the reading as legitimate objects of mobilization.
Ethnograph the struggle and contribute to it
One of the first merits of the work is its ethnographic nature. By carefully unfolding a case, Stéphane Tonnelat participates in a knowledge enterprise specific to empirical social sciences: accumulating materials to bring out regularities and open up questions. Where much research focuses on salient moments of an environmental conflict – the emergence, peaks of mobilization such as the installation of a ZADor the victories – the ethnographer follows the collective in its ordinary engagement, between meetings, municipal councils, press releases, gatherings, sound system problems or construction of a tower… to understand its successes as well as its failures in the enterprise of “ rescue ” of the “ last fertile lands of Île-de-France “. The survey, carried out over more than six years, makes it possible to follow the mobilization longitudinally in its transformations, its moments of uncertainty, its internal recompositions in a “ war of attrition » against developers.
The ethnographic originality is also found in the writing, deliberately narrative, which alternates narrative scenes in the field – taking us on board with the activists – and analytical or theoretical propositions. Any good ethnography inevitably involves immersion in the field. In this case, the researcher makes the choice, in the name of personal convictions, to commit to the cause by explaining the epistemic and moral implications of such a position and the ways of minimizing the “ snap » – well documented in anthropology – consisting of conducting the investigation within a group at the risk of adopting its points of view.
Analytically, the book adopts a pragmatist perspective, starting from the concerns of the actors. Drawing on the contributions of John Dewey, S. Tonnelat shows that the mobilization against a shopping center emerges from problematizations and publicizations carried out by activists, who conduct their own investigation in order to understand why and how to oppose such a project. How, for example, to deconstruct fictitious promises of local employment ? By following these situated questions, the ethnographer deciphers how a struggle is concretely constructed: how to make it popular, how to make it visible, how to articulate local anchoring with broader alliances. This approach makes it possible to restore the processual dimension of engagement, emphasizing experimentation, adjustments and collective learning.
Two main ideas structure the argument, confirming and extending several results from the sociology of environmental mobilizations.
Neither zadists nor novices
The work offers a substantial contribution to the sociology of anti-development activists and collectives. It highlights the diversity of profiles involved in the collective, far from the homogenizing representations of “ zadists “. There we find experienced activists, often from long careers in trade unionism, the associative or political world, but also more recently engaged actors, through the renewal of the environmentalist cause. The place of retirees appears particularly important in the story, as they mobilize militant capital accumulated during their professional and associative lives. Through these plural commitments (being a yellow vest or member of a naturalist association which sits on a departmental commission, or even affiliated with the ZAD), the book highlights the importance of circulation between struggles, whether it is Notre-Dame-des-Landes – which has become a model –, mobilizations in Île-de-France or other collectives opposed to development projects. These circulations encourage the dissemination of repertoires of action, activist know-how and common interpretive frameworks.
The analysis also highlights the role of heterogeneous alliances, sometimes established with ideologically distant actors, such as certain merchant organizations. These alliances, often pragmatic, illustrate the ability of the Triangle de Gonesse collective to overcome traditional political divisions to achieve common objectives. At the same time, the work does not avoid the internal inequalities of the group, particularly in terms of race, gender and division of activist labor, which tend to reproduce certain asymmetries in the social world. The collective studied is rather white, elderly, and far from being representative of the sociology of the surrounding inhabitants, who rather come from the working classes or from migratory backgrounds. Nevertheless, they managed to get the government to bend, which abandoned the project in 2019.
A “ radical reformism »
The diversity of tactics used constitutes another salient result, confirming other surveys. The collective uses a wide range of actions: participation in administrative procedures (municipal councils, public inquiries), organization of festive and symbolic events, land occupations, legal appeals, naturalist counter-expertise, even more transgressive actions. This plurality appears to be a condition of efficiency, making it possible to play on several registers simultaneously.
The author analyzes the way in which the collective articulates legitimacy and legality. Actors constantly navigate between these two registers, sometimes seeking to demonstrate that they are on the side of law and the general interest, sometimes to justify actions which, although legally questionable, appear morally legitimate. This tension runs through the entire mobilization and sometimes gives rise to internal debates, particularly on the use of violence or sabotage. Conversely, an activist claims the “ over-civil obedience “. The author proposes the notion of “ radical reformism » to characterize this political positioning of the collective. This is neither in direct and external opposition to the State nor in simple integration into institutional arrangements. The actors contest certain decisions, oppose themselves with all their might, sometimes engaging their bodies against the forces of order, while mobilizing the resources of law and institutions, thus cultivating a hybrid, but living, democratic culture.
Defending farmland without farmers ?
If the work is rich and convincing, it also opens several avenues for critical discussion. The first concerns the relatively marginal place of farmers in the story. Even though the subject of the book is the defense of agricultural lands, they only appear quite late in the mobilization. This absence constitutes a sociological enigma that the author only clarifies with geo-social elements of explanation, particularly linked to the structure of local land. In the case of the Triangle de Gonesse, the owners are not necessarily farmers, but often external economic actors, which limits their involvement in land defense. Only a cereal grower, neither owner nor even really tenant of the land, joins the fight by lending land. This configuration also invites us to rethink the very notion of “ agriculture » in these peri-urban areas.
One limitation concerns the treatment of institutional, economic and political actors. Elected officials appear several times: municipality “ pro » shopping center, role of P.S. local in mobilization “ for the layout », or conversely presence of elected officials EELV Or PCF on the rallies against EuropaCity. If their relay role is well documented, the tensions that they can arouse within the collective are relatively little visible. In other contexts, the relationship with elected officials can constitute a central issue, a source of strategic redefinitions and could have been the subject of further study.
On a methodological level, the assumed choice of a point of view on the side of the opponents limits access to the logic of planners and promoters. When these appear – for example during press conferences or the presence of a communicator at an assembly – the analysis gains depth. These moments show the complexity of the networks of actors involved in the project (promoters, investors, communicators, public institutions), suggesting that a more systematic exploration of these planning worlds remains to be done for future investigations.