Temporalités à l’œuvre dans les chantiers du bâtiment

Abstract

This research focuses on the temporalities governing the development of professional networks of populations affected by high mobility, such as building contractors and site foremen. Royal construction sites in Piedmont during the first half of the 18th century are an interesting case study. The sources, especially public contracts, record the time this network was constituted, highlighting its specific nature, namely its dynamism and continuous regeneration. The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the temporal framework that guided the behavior of the actors by giving rise to those networks and this dynamism. Structuring the corpus with the help of a two-mode network combining documentation and individual data provides an effective way to access the different dimensions that contribute to understanding entrepreneurs’ network, to judging its relevance and its evolutions. It is also a way to observe the temporalities specific to each component of the corpus: the outcome of a public contract related to the political situation of the Sardinian State, the operational sequences of each site which imply the various specializations of the contracts and contracting parties, the relational trajectories of entrepreneurs (the nature of their interventions and their roles that change with each contract), the biographical and migratory itineraries of those individuals. The protagonists’ rationales are organized amidst this complex set of interactions marked by diverging temporalities, according to what they perceive. The resulting practices shape the professional environment of building contractors in Torino during the first half of the 18th century.

Keywords

• Migrations
• Two-mode Networks
• Piedmont
• Torino
• Contractors
• Building Sites