Open-air garages: social and spatial configuration of informal labor

Abstract

This article discusses the main results of collective ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the everyday life of the working classes in Roubaix, a de-industrialized city that has been going through demographic and urban decline for several decades. Men living in the poorest neighborhoods have managed to produce activities on the margins of the formal labor market –that has evicted them–, such as outdoor auto repairs. engage A source of income, of qualification and of work for different gene-rations, mechanical services are offered in the street, on parking lots or in the city interstitial spaces. We analyze the regulation of the distribution of positions and status, the porosity between formality and informality.