Les écoquartiers, territoires d’expérimentation des nouvelles utopies urbaines ? Le cas de l’habitat participatif

The sustainable city, slogan of the modern utopias, is a place full of potential, offering different freedoms, links and meaning, a theatre for learning and social expression. Can we imagine building it without its inhabitants? After all, the structures created by the inhabitants originate in their dreams, imaginations and decisions. The sustainable city offers the promise of putting the enchantment back into living places by accentuating participative governance of planning. Taking the hypothesis that eco-neighbourhoods can facilitate experimentation in housing and the sharing of living spaces by fostering resident involvement, we have crossed the discourse analysis from the planning authorities of the corpus 'EcoQuartiers 2011' with three case studies from the Bordeaux urban area. We will show that the experimentations freely entered into by the residents come up against numerous restraints (property, funding, planning), whereas participative housing projects initiated by housing providers and local councils are closer to real estate operations of social home ownership. Future inhabitants imagine the project but within a fixed framework. The desires of resident groups to explore alternative modes of living demonstrate a repolitisation, in so far as they develop new forms of political involvement, off the institutional beaten track