The Geopolitics of Urban Green Belts: Between Exclusionary Zoning and the Militarisation of Urban Space

For French-speaking geographers, the term urban geopolitics refers to the research stream that the journal Hérodote developed to analyse the increasing complexity of and conflict in and around territorial policies. For their English-speaking counterparts, the concept commonly refers to a more recent approach to analyse among others the militarisation of urban space. Despite their differences, this paper shows that both approaches can be usefully combined. Indeed, a combined approach can shed new light on urban processes by enriching the comparison between seemingly "similar" urban policies in the Global North and South. The aim of this paper is to discuss the merits of the two schools of urban geopolitics. To do so, it compares the creation of green belts in the peripheries of large cities to control urban sprawl: Lyon (France) and Rabat (Morocco).