In suburban districts irrigation is often presented as an efficient and lasting method of structuring space. This option was in particular the basis of the hydraulic installations on the Millery-Mornant Plateaux to the west of Lyons, but ihe ownership of the land is at stake and the irrigation network. In this case seems to be a precarious rampart against the pressures in favour of a production competing with agricultural use (in this case, the mining of quarreys for sand and gravel). This analysis reconstitutes the dynamics of the conflicting forces built up here and the final hegemony of the quarreyowners. The means of this take-over seem sufficiently « ordinary » (a policy of sytematicalJy gaining possession of the land by outbidding farm and prices, an effective strategy in the collective debate held in order to establish the Plan for the occupation of the Land POS) to occur again in other hypotheses of conflict over the use of suburban space.
