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In the seventeenth century, Lyon’s urban authorities undertook to renovate the city in order to make their authority felt. The aim was to change the sense of the "urban space" against the traditional uses of the roads and places of the town. The municipal magistrates defending "public space", entered into a conflict with the popular notion of "common place". The wood footbridges upon the Saone’s river in the 1630–1640s are one of the examples of this confrontation. They allow historians to study the conflicting conceptions of the city. The study of this conflict also questions the pertinence of Habermas’s theories about the construction of "public space." The devout elite was of the opinion that this place had to be redefined in terms of its common character and its purely religious nature.