From Paris to Delhi via Mexico City: Major Home Ownership Programmes for the Middle Classes in Metropolitan Suburbs

The aim of this article is to understand the sociospatial changes in process in the peripheral areas of large metropolises, in the North and in the South, as a result of the emergence of a new and relatively uniform housing supply for the lower middle classes. Partly neglected by the public authorities, the question of the trajectories of these new residential complexes, from their construction to their integration into the city through their settlement, arises at different scales, from the local to the metropolitan scale, and with different focuses, from the most technical to the most social. By regarding to the cases of Mexico City, Delhi and Paris, through statistical databases on the one hand and field observations and surveys collected with a common grid on the other, we can question the integration of new residential complexes into the system of access to housing and access to the city, into urban production systems, and into the processes of social division of metropolitan space.