Vivre le patrimoine urbain au quotidien : pour une approche de la patrimonialité

This paper questions the difficulty of the operationnalisation of a concept, that of patrimoniality, by setting up a qualitative methodology. We define patrimoniality as the act of attachment of ordinary users in a town with what they regard as their heritage. At the center of this research there is a methodological reflexion. It wants to be a theoretical construction in order to understand the ordinary creation of how one regards one’s heritage in a particular urban space, in this case the historical center of the town of Avignon. We thus elaborated a methodology and explored a certain number of tools allowing us to locate and study the patrimoniality and its representations, its methods of existence in the discourse and the ordinary practices of urban space. The device of the itinerant interview carried out in the historical centre of Avignon has several assets : it makes force of proof by the setting in the presence of the person interviewed in the places, it makes it possible to make a narration while traversing the city, it makes it possible to have access to the daily, ordinary practices of the city. Thanks to him, one can understand how the ordinary practitioner makes his attachment with the urban heritage through the ordinary practices. The analysis of interviews made it possible to understand certain indicators of patrimoniality which allow us to understand the patrimonial representations from the subject’s point of view. From the discourse of the interviewees, one can understand that the patrimoniality is a certain manner of creating a relationship, an experience, an attachment with a recognized or unrecognized (ordinary) patrimonial object.