The Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution has provoked researchers to find new ways of engaging with the emergence of popular organizations and movements who are highly mobilized and seeking new forms of popular power and the deepening of democratic practices both within the country and for the Latin American region. This research project argues that at the core of the Bolivarian Revolution is an urban revolution in which barrio residents play a key role in the transformation of the country. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Neil Smith, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja, among others, it is argued that a spatial analysis of urban social relations, while usually reserved for the study of capital’s role in producing contemporary cities, also allows research to visibilize how popular organizations act as agents in the production and transformation of urban space in their own right. At the center of this study is the Urban Land Committee movement, which by drawing on what Lefebvre has called ‘lived space’ knowledges, has evolved from an organization that primarily sought land titles for barrio inhabitants to a national movement that is currently pursuing the ‘right to the city’, that is, decision-making power over urban space. Through an investigation of the movement’s strategies, and with an understanding that these strategies are inherently spatial in nature, it is possible to ask how the movement is transforming urban space in Venezuela. Ultimately, the work of the Urban Land Committee movement has implications both for theories about the production of urban space and for the construction of popular power in the Bolivarian Revolution.

Cette thèse porte sur le rapport des femmes au politique, étudié à travers le prisme de la participation locale des classes populaires. Au Venezuela, sous les gouvernements Chávez, la volonté étatique de favoriser la participation locale et de lutter contre les inégalités de genre, croise et rend visible des dynamiques et des trajectoires individuelles d’acteurs ordinaires, qui sont en majorité des femmes. La politique bolivarienne de la participation se réalise à partir de l’expérience quotidienne et des relations interpersonnelles. Les structures étatiques locales que sont les Conseils Locaux de Planification Publique et les Conseils Communaux articulent ainsi espace public et espace privé. Dans ce pays matrifocal, la pratique de cette politique territorialisée permet aux femmes des classes populaires de transformer leur autorité en une ressource politique qui est désormais reconnue et institutionnalisée. Ce processus modifie le rapport à soi, à la famille, à la communauté, mais aussi au pouvoir institué, allant jusqu’à transformer les rapports gouvernants-gouvernés. Fruit de sept années de recherche et de près de deux ans de terrain, cette thèse allie les techniques classiques de l’enquête sociologique à de nouveaux outils révélant l’importance du tournant affectif induit par l’expérience participative dans la vie des enquêtés. / This PhD dissertation is about women’s relations to politics, viewed from the perspective of the popular background’s local participation. During the Chavez’s governments in Venezuela, the State’s will to favour local participation and fight against gender’s inequalities allows ordinary actors’dynamics and individual paths to meet and in the meantime, to make them visible. These actors occur to be mostly women. The Bolivarian participation politics is performed from the daily experience and interpersonnal relationship. The local State institutions - that are the Consejos Locales de Planificación Pública and the Consejos Comunales - intertwine public and private space. In this matrifocal country, this territorialized politics allows women from popular background to convert their authority into a political ressource that has been acknowledged and institutionnalized. This process changes the relationships to oneself, to the family and the community but to the institutionnalized power as well, going as far as to transform relationships between the ruling classes and the ones who are ruled by them. Based on a seven years research and a two years fieldwork, this PhD dissertation associates sociological studies’classic techniques and new tools revealing the importance of the affective turn brought by the participative experience in the interviewees’s life.