Urbanity: looking into the discourse of researchers

International audience“Urbanity” has become a “fuzzy/unclear concept” (Bourdin, 2010) which is even polysemous in the discourses of researchers in urban studies. I have undertaken, in my PhD, a series of interviews with researchers in order to try to understand and to deconstruct the discourse about urbanity, aiming to surpass a classical and limited bibliographic approach. This series of interviews was held with geographers, urban sociologists, psychologists, architects and urban planners. Urban studies, today, require an interdisciplinary approach, which is especially the case with such a difficult concept like urbanity. This additional methodological approach helps us understand this polysemous terms and the paradigms underlying the concept of urbanity, so as to recognize the different theoretical approaches suggested by the researchers about this topic.At the crossroads of these approaches, this article proposes a theoretical typology to understand meanings of urbanity in the contemporary urban studies. It identifies four ways to tackle urbanity: Urbanity considered above all as an interaction; urbanity thought as an interaction in situation; urbanity thought in a critical and relative approach and urbanity as a key to reading contemporary urban realities. This categorization is not based on an existing line of thought but on specific ways to handle the topic of urbanity