Society at the Core of Metropolises

Writing about French metropolitan society may be like hunting an animal that does not exist in a territory that doesn’t exist either, because the notion of a metropolis is foggy, and the idea of a society is becoming increasingly difficult to grasp (Dubet and Martucelli 1998; McLachlan 2020). The concept of metropolization (Lacour and Puissant 1999) is quite widely used in international literature—although this is less true for English speakers than for those of Latin languages—and has spurred a lot of research. The question then is whether this process produces a type of city specific enough to be identified.