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Métropoles, n°33/2023

La ville marchande en temps de pandémie

Edited by Vincent Chabault, Emmanuelle Lallement

Métropoles



The commercial city (« ville marchande ») in the time of pandemic

This issue, initiated just a few months after the French government's announcement of new restrictive measures (April 2021), proposes to examine the destabilization and redevelopment caused by the pandemic is in the retail sector, and to study its temporary or lasting consequences on urban space. What is a market town when it can no longer be one, when most of its shops are closed or subject to constraints and new regulations?

Bringing together sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and urban planners, the dossier presents analyses carried out in China, South Africa, the United States and France on a diversity of spaces and situations of commercial exchange, which are not usually thought of together (stores, restaurants, wholesale and retail markets, online commerce). These are brought together here in a common interrogation –what the Covid-19 pandemic has done to the city and to commerce– while thinking more globally about urban realities and their future.