A 'triple bind': local attitudes to the energy crisis. A theoretical discussion on the situation of low-income households in French periurban neighbourhoods
Résumé
Peri-urban areas are identified by long home-to-work distances. These areas keep on spreading over the countryside. They thus constitute the more visible geographic frame for car-dependent lifestyles. As the energy crisis deepens with respect to households' budgets and national or local policy priorities, the low- and middle-income dwellers of those areas are threatened by oil vulnerability, because of their petrol and domestic energy consumption. Such a threat appears as an economic violence because it constraints their current resources, and ends up in shaping their lifestyle. But this economic violence is also combined with a symbolic one. Although the whole society depends on direct and indirect oil consumption - while car ownership and uses are still actively underpinned by advertisements and public growth policies - several institutions indicate their concerns for the peri-urban households, as victims but also as threats for environmental sustainability. Then, periurban households suffer from a double penalty of economic and symbolic violence. This paper proposes to qualify the way households deal with this combined violence. Interviews with low- and middle-income dwellers of Paris and Dijon peri-urban areas reveal how they resist to the symbolic violence on the basis of other constraints than energy, which transform their ways of using and speaking of energy. The specific components of their lifestyle that are affected either by the economic violence or by the symbolic one set their experience of the both economic and symbolic peri-urban vulnerability.