This thesis studies the social history of the poor in Bulawayo, the second largest city in Zimbabwe, between 1960 and 2005. This is accomplished by focusing on the housing and unemployment crises they faced and the manifest reluctance of authorities to either provide enough housing or to accept mushrooming informal housing and economic activities in response to these acute shortages. I attempt to highlight the fragility of the poor’s claim to the right to permanent urban residency emphasizing inadequate state funding and poverty and continuities in some discourses from colonial to the post colonial era as factors responsible for spreading and sustaining the discrimination against low income earners in the city. These included authorities’ perceptions that all Africans belonged to rural areas, have access to land, and that low income Africans were immoral and unclean. While these perceptions tended to be fuelled by the racial divide between whites and blacks during the colonial period, class and gender dynamics among Africans crisscrossed that racial divide. After independence, while these perceptions were still alive, central government policy ambitions and failures were instrumental in influencing the welfare and fate of the urban masses and their relations with the former middle class Africans and nationalist leaders who assumed power in 1980. It becomes clear that there was a misunderstanding by authorities on how most of the rural land was not able to support some families because of infertility or lack of resources to successfully till the land by most some families. The overall conclusion is that poor people’s rights to permanent residency were elusive up to 2005 and their living and survival space has been continuing to shrink in the city.

Depuis les années 1970, les espaces publics des métropoles contemporaines sont devenus d’importants enjeux pour les pouvoirs publics municipaux soucieux de leur attractivité comme pour certains habitants attachés à leur cadre de vie. Les discours qui accompagnent cette valorisation insistent sur la qualité urbaine, mais la production d’espaces sûrs et conviviaux induit également des processus d’exclusion ou d’altérisation. La multiplicité des figures de la menace est alimentée par la diffusion de discours sécuritaires qui érigent certains groupes en symboles de la dégradation des espaces. Ce réinvestissement de l’espace public à la fois sur le plan sémantique et matériel se traduit donc par différentes mesures visant à mieux contrôler ses usages et son image.Ma recherche s’appuie sur trois études de cas à Paris : le mobilier urbain, le système d’accréditation des musiciens dans le métro et les patrouilles de correspondants de nuit. Ces dispositifs de gestion de l’indésirabilité donnent aux producteurs et gestionnaires d’espaces publics la possibilité d’assurer une mise en ordre du social par une mise en ordre du spatial. Leur analyse me permet de cerner différentes figures d’indésirables et les registres de justification déployés par les acteurs institutionnels ou certains entrepreneurs de morale pour défendre des hiérarchies dans les droits d’usage des espaces publics. L’indésirabilité étant une construction sociale et culturelle, mon objectif a été de dénaturaliser ces catégorisations dominantes pour mettre à jour des rapports de pouvoir asymétriques et montrer comment ils se matérialisent dans la production et la régulation des espaces publics / Since the 70’s the public spaces of the contemporary metropolis have become important issues for municipal authorities concerned with their attractiveness as well as for some inhabitants who feel committed to their environment. Speeches surrounding such valorization insist on urban quality, but the production of safe and user-friendly spaces also implies processes of exclusion or alterization. The large number of threat figures is sustained by the diffusion of security discourses that make some groups into symbols of urban decay. Such reinvestment of public space on both the semantic and material level is therefore translated into different measures aiming at better controlling its uses and its image.My research relies on three case studies in Paris: urban furniture, licensing of some subway musicians, and the city’s security patrol services. These devices used for managing the undesirables allow the producers and managers of public spaces to put in order the social by putting in order the spatial. Analyzing these devices gives me the means for discerning different figures of undesirable people and records of justification enacted by institutional agencies or moral entrepreneurs in order to defend hierarchies in the rights of using public spaces. As undesirability is a social and cultural construction, I focused on denaturalizing these dominant categorizations, in order to highlight asymmetrical power relations and to show how they materialize in the production and the regulation of public spaces