Palimpsestes mémoriels, gentrification inachevée et voisinages migratoires : l’exemple de commerces de La Guillotière à Lyon

Abstract

A popular district in downtown Lyon, La Guillotière has welcomed the city’s migratory waves for more than a century. Today, its population is experiencing gentrification, while its streets remain an important area for popular wandering. In this context of urban and social transformations, one can wonder about the positioning of the shops, caught between a coming and going, popular, clientele and another richer one living on the spot. We are interested here in three shopping subspaces of this district. In the south, some Asian stores established since the 1970s remain immutable. Some others, often owned by the children of these first generation immigrants, tend, by adapting their commercial offer or by promoting this little Lyons’ Chinatown, to transform ethnicity into a cultural product and thus rather to move alongside the sociological transformations of the district. In the north, in a more Mediterranean commercial area, two success stories of tradespeople, one of Armenian and the other of Moroccan heritage, show the capacity of these renewed businesses to attract customers beyond the district, while putting an emphasis on the ethnic features of the products sold. Finally, the central square of the district hosts an informal flea market dovetailing with the sales of illicit substances, which together, by raising awareness of poverty in the public space, create a hotspot and perhaps a form of resistance to the gentrification of the floors of the Guillotière district.

Keywords

• Gentrification
• Ethnicized shops
• Lyon