The political conversion of social interests: political order and the social division of local space

At the intersection of political sociology and urban sociology, this article explores the process of spatialization of the political order by articulating two angles of analysis, which constitute so many blind spots produced by the compartmentalization of disciplines and research themes: on the one hand, the spatialization of social groups and their political representation, which are always inscribed in specific territories, whose particular social morphology affects the ability (or inability) of each group to politically convert and represent its interests; on the other, public policy, which modulates both the social composition of territories and the ability of groups or scales of government to impose, arbitrate or reproduce different social interests. In proposing to unravel the links in the political conversion of social groups’ interests on a local scale, the paper argues for a decompartmentalization of social science disciplines and methods, which is crucial to ultimately analyzing the way in which territorialized political domination is exercised.