The elite and the poor. Research of the "entre-soi" and representations of poverty in the areas of uppper social classes of three cities: Paris, Sao Paulo and Delhi – PSPD

It is striking to note that the report to the poverty of the higher social classes has very rarely been studied as such. This may seem all the more surprising that the historian Louis Chevalier had established, research on the first half of the 19th century, as urban inequities could be explained by the representations of the bourgeois elite on laborious classes identified as dangerous classes. By designating the workers from the poor neighbourhoods by the words "barbarians" or "wild", by reducing the working condition to biological traits and physical behaviour, the bourgeois elite and observers of the time were fueled in the consciousness of their contemporaries the notion that social separatism was justified as a State of emergency to unsafe and crime. It should be noted that the constitution of between it themselves urban of the higher social classes the summer studied over the last twenty years the almost exclusive perspective of peer aggregation motivated by the interests of the accumulation of different types of capital. However, it is possible to assume that this choice residential rich is also motivated by representations singular urban poverty, a report to the impoverished popular categories appropriate today to study as such. This project is a senior title that deserves a clarification. "The elite and the poor" intends to establish a link between, on the one hand, the sociology of urban inequality in terms of attitudes and behaviours of the higher social classes, and on the other hand, the sociology of forms and represent poverty. This project on the general assumption on urban inequalities, the objective facts are important, but they must be analyzed in relation to consciousness that contemporaries may have and the conclusions that they derive from them to clarify or justify their own practices. Studying representations of poverty among the higher social classes who have chosen to live in a more or less “auto-ségrégué” district, is to take the party to analyse the relationship between concrete practices of the entre-soi research and representations of the world of the poor, which may be based on the concept of insecurity (risks of theft, physical or verbal abuse, etc.), but also on the fear of being somehow contaminated by modes of life deemed culturally adverse or intolerable in public space. For example, live in a neighbourhood "protected" by the higher prices of the market could match, not only to a search for social prestige, but a desire to update distance of the poor and research of a social and moral order also freed all nuisances and likely to be encountered in an open space interaction costs and socially mixed. To undertake this research, we opt for a comparative approach. We have this selected three lands in geographically remote cities as located in three continents different (Paris, São Paulo, Delhi), but also very contrasting both of the economic, social and political point of view, that the historical and cultural tradition.