De l'espace nomade à l'espace mobile en passant par l'espace du contrat: une expérience théorique

Abstract

The paper retraces both a scientific itinerary and what might be described as a stratification and a history of the dominant social forms of structuring space: nomadism, sedentariness, mobility. It argues against a possible evolutionist interpretation of this scheme by privileging a synchronic observation of the various intersecting spatial forms in what might be called the truth of the place (which is the stage of intersection). The theoretical idea of a mobile space is thus schematized by opposing it to the paradigm of fixedness which dominates classical as well as modern spatial analysis. The rapprochement of nomadic space (being the source of reflection) and mobile space (being the result of reflection) is presented as a “methodological” space avoiding metaphorical vagueness.