Forced Displacements and Conflicts for Urban Legitimacy in Southern Cities

This issue of L'Espace Politique proposes to pay attention to forced displacement in a context of urban changes rather than in conflict situations. It focuses on forced mobility within urban areas, during evictions conducted on behalf of urban renewal projects in competitive and neoliberal cities. Despite the suggested alternatives and recommendations from international actors, forced eviction are used to "clean" southern cities from their most undesirable city dwellers by relegating them to the margins of the city. In this sense, the evictions reveal unequal power relations during a particular moment that highlights the co-production of new referents of the right to the city. This introductory article intends to underline the political and social challenges of constraint mobility in the city and particularly the conflicts and disputes surrounding so as to identify different justifications emanating from the actors involved in these forced displacement.