Residential segregation and refounded neighborhoods. The uses of comparison in Paris and Milan

This article combines different forms of comparison: interlocal, international and interconceptual. Within the socio-spatial mosaics of major European cities, it identifies a self-segregation pattern among the upper (-middle) classes and a relation to residential integration that have been overlooked until now. This specific way of producing and inhabiting a city is observed in neighborhoods close to the new business centers, and with a high concentration of corporate executives. We call it refoundation. For it cannot be equated with the preservation of traditional bourgeois homogeneity, or with gradual gentrification, or suburban secession; nor even as a combination of the three. On the contrary, it is an original phenomenon, whose distinctive features and their Paris and Milan versions, can only be fully described through an approach attentive to meaning-making. (C) 2013 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.