Incursions upon agricultural land within metropolitan peripheries: Deadlocks and geo-legal trajectories of regularization in Paris and Mexico-city

Within metropolitan peripheries, irrespective of the national or regional contexts, the clash between rural and urban areas is at the center of metropolitan production. This clash is a twofold movement with urban sprawl, on the one hand, and major environmental injunctions, on the other. By looking at the two contexts of Paris and Mexico City, our research objective is to comprehend peripheries as places magnifying competing land dynamics, leading to scenarios of crises as well as social, political and legal innovation s . The methodology is based on the analysis of field observations and surveys, public databases and official documents, using a social geographical approach. The article analyzes how stakeholders within the land system control peripheral land, focusing on public authorities, property market actors, and developers. The goal is to show the limitations of this control and reveal how and why residents and citizen groups build arrangements and regularizations. At the end, this article aims to contribute to the debates on the land rules deadlocks in the urban-rural interface. From different deadlocks observed in each context, the comparison underlines converging geo-legal trajectories of land regulation. • Rural-urban interface reveals ‘the land unthought’ and the confusion of norms. • Discrepancy between planning and land use shows conflict and socio-spatial division. • Land systems and current legal codes are unsuitable for hybridization of periurban. • Arrangements leads to different trajectories of regularization and law evolution. • International comparison highlights converging geo-legal trajectories of land regulation.