1203 | 581 | Inhabiting the uninhabitable. The example of the shack owners of the Rhone delta.

In the Rhone delta, the workers (salt industries, dockers of the port of Marseille) have historically faced a plurality of risks linked to capitalist modernity (risks linked to water, sanitary risks, industrial risks…). In order to face these risks, these workers practice for several decades a subaltern urbanism that highlights an adaptive action. In this presentation, we present the results of a survey carried out among three communities of marginalized inhabitants (Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône, Beauduc, Salin-de-Giraud), who are experimenting shacks housing practices (“cabanons”), which are repressed by the public authorities. These communities of habitat and practices can be analyzed as commons (Dardot and Laval 2014) and are examples of other ways of inhabiting that make another life possible._x000D_
By mobilizing the concept of riskscapes (Müller-Mahn and Everts 2012; Frick-Trzebitzky 2019), we inform how these spaces are practiced and appropriated in the everyday life and how improvised and fugitive infrastructural arrangements are negotiated by shack owners. Today, mainstream adaptation policies, such as Nature-based Solutions, are increasingly contested. Our research shows how these alternative ways of inhabiting highlight inspiring postmodernist adaptive practices to face climate change.

Antoine Brochet
Institut des Géosciences de l’Environnement (CNRS) – Grenoble

ID Abstract: 581