Vintimille : de la ville frontalière aux frontières de la ville. Migrations, mobilités et résistances à la frontière franco-italienne

The aim of the research is to examine how the dialectical relationship between the border device and changes in migration routes helps to create the social, spatial and temporal boundaries of the city. The aim is to offer an ethnography of a border town which, over time, has become a major migration route for secondary movements from Italy to France and Northern Europe. The field of study is therefore the Franco-Italian border and the town of Ventimiglia, as both a privileged observatory of the practices of migrant subjectivities, which it precipitates on a local scale, and a laboratory for border governance policies. This observatory reveals the complexity of the new configurations of contemporary borders, which are characterized by the mobility of their mechanisms. This thesis is therefore intended to mark an epistemological, theoretical, and methodological turning point at the intersection of border studies and the anthropology of the city. The city of Ventimiglia provides an opportunity to examine the process of bordering, i.e. the ability to reproduce mechanisms of control and exclusion well beyond the border line that separates Italy and France. This process creates a relationship of continuity between the material border - whose function is to slow down, select, filter, and differentiate between bodies on the move - and the urban borders that are reproduced in the city, with the same logic. For this reason, I propose to analyse the process that leads from the border city to the city borders. The counter-field to this impediment is the reaction of subjectivities on the move, for whom these borders continue to multiply: whether on the border line or along its urban tentacles, it is a question of continuing the journey, of reclaiming one's movement as well as one's time in life. This dialectic leads the researcher to position herself on a precise part of the battleground that constitutes the terrain observed, by militating since 2017 within Progetto 20k, a collective that makes freedom of movement its political terrain of action. Two main lines of research are envisaged: one focusing on the analysis of the context and its recompositions, both historical and everyday, through a diachronic analysis of the research area. As this is a borderland and a historical site of migratory passage, I will analyse the readaptations of this borderland in an analytical journey connecting this local terrain to a European and global (geopolitical) space. The micro framework will thus be interconnected with a macro scale. Two major historical moments are proposed as temporal landmarks for the production and writing of this study: 2015, the first pivotal year in the contemporary history of this borderland, and the covid-19 health crisis. These were two moments of 'crisis' that brought about major changes at both local and international level. The conclusions of this study underline the fact that moments of crisis (political, health, economic, 'security') imply strategic moments capable of leading to the redefinition of paradigms and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The other axis looks at the processes of subjectivation of people on the move, and the practices of reappropriating the spaces they pass through and the temporalities they inhabit. Two major historical moments are proposed as benchmarks for the production and writing of this study: 2015, the first pivotal year in the contemporary history of this border, and the covid-19 health crisis. These were two moments of 'crisis' that brought about major changes at both local and international level. The conclusions of this study underline the fact that moments of crisis (political, health, economic, 'security') imply strategic moments capable of leading to the redefinition of paradigms and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The other axis looks at the processes of subjectivation of people on the move, and the practices of reappropriating the spaces they pass through and the temporalities they inhabit. The interlocutors of this ethnography are not only the people on the move, but all the players involved in the dynamics of the border, including the supporters of the collectives and associations in the area, as well as the residents of the border town and the surrounding valleys. This ethnography is the result of extensive fieldwork, which lasted from 2016 to 2022.