The deindustrialization that has been underway since the 1970s has confined entire sections of the working classes to the margins of the labor market. Kept out of the main commercial circuits, these populations have had to reorganize their work and daily lives in order to meet their basic needs, according to a dynamic that gives urban space a new centrality: for them, access to most of the material and symbolic resources necessary to maintain a dignified existence is closely linked to their territorial roots.

However, the practices associated with this popular centrality are now being challenged. Caught up in the race for metropolitanization, some cities would ultimately like to replace these populations, whom they consider to be "doing nothing," with others from the middle and upper classes, not hesitating to raise the specter of communitarianism and ghettoization. On the contrary, it is a question of understanding what contemporary processes of social fragmentation mean for people who are nothing more and nothing less than workers.