What kind of urban planning in/for rural areas?

Yoan Miot, Elsa Vivant, and Maryvonne Prévot edited and coordinated issue 59, "What kind of urban planning in/for rural areas?" of the journal Territoires en

mouvement

Link: https://journals.openedition.org/tem/10859

Since the mid-2010s, the issue of urban planning in rural areas has been on the government's agenda through the successive rollout of various incentive schemes such as the Atelier des Territoires, the Call for Expressions of Interest in Town Centers (in 2014), the "Small Towns of Tomorrow" program (2020) and the "Villages of the Future" program (2023), covering both rural municipalities and small towns that serve as hubs for rural areas. These measures share the assumption that there is a lack of engineering in these areas, which they seek to remedy through financial and technical support and by encouraging professionals and researchers to take an interest in them. This assumption is reinforced by the fact that many rural communities have long remained outside the traditional instruments of urban planning and subject to national urban planning regulations (RNU).

In the context of the advent of an urban society, so-called rural areas are also affected by the contradictions of contemporary society brought about by social, economic, demographic, and environmental upheavals. The effects of these transformations are, in part, specific to rural areas (Jousseaume, 2020), leading to a differentiation of situations (Talandier, 2008) between "productive countryside in difficulty," "aging countryside in decline," "peri-urban countryside," and "tourist and residential countryside " (Hilal et al., 2011). Others refer to territorial issues reminiscent of urban situations, while renewing their interpretative frameworks due to rural specificities. For example, depopulation in a group of rural areas in central, northern, and eastern France is similar to a process of (urban) decline (Cauchi-Duval et al., 2016). These dynamics also give rise to contradictions. The demographic revival in southern and western France is accompanied by increased aging (Dedeire et al., 2011). Rural areas are marked by both vacancy and property deterioration in their town centers and by high land consumption in the outskirts (Charmes, 2013; Melot et al., 2018). The withdrawal of the state from these areas makes it difficult to maintain service activities (Chouraqui, 2020), even though they are a significant factor in the attractiveness of these areas (Talandier, 2013). The very low density and rising economic costs associated with cars reinforce the challenges relating to mobility (Motte-Baumvol, 2007; Desjardins, 2008).

In this context of multiple changes, this special issue provides an initial overview of rural urban planning practices, considered here as activities aimed at transforming the built environment and managing rural areas (Boutet, 2004). While some authors argue in favor of rural urban planning defined in opposition to urban planning practices in urban areas (Jousseaume, 2016; Boutet, 2004), this issue analyzes how urban planning practitioners in rural areas are taking existing mechanisms and reinventing them. In doing so, they contribute to the renewal of urban planning and the understanding of rural territorial dynamics and their specificities.

The six articles in this issue share a more or less central and explicit focus on the specificities and methods of intervention in areas described as rural. The first article, by Annabelle Morel-Brochet, Emmanuel Bioteau, Alexandra Le Provost, and Martine Long, entitled "Longuenée-en-Anjou, a new municipality: villages that must think of themselves as a city," analyzes the institutional reorganization generated by the process of creating a new municipality. The authors show how the municipal merger creates tension between residents' appropriations, policies, and projects due to the shift from a collection of peri-urban villages to a small town. Faced with an organization of services, policies, and practices structured around peri-urban villages, residents and elected officials are questioning how to create a sense of territory in this new administrative space. The second article, "(Re)mobilizing actors around a territorial project: a question of method and medium" by Elsa Vivant, discusses methods for building a territorial project through a case study of a rural area in central France where urban planning professionals are seeking to investigate new ways of both changing perceptions of a rural area that are negative and enlisting local actors in a development dynamic. Based on an analysis of the outputs (models, maps, films, etc.) approached in terms of intermediate objects (Vinck, 2009), the author shows the importance of cooperation issues in the adoption of new working methods. The work process organized around the collective production of fiction films questions the relationship to the territory and the expectations of a territorial project. The third article, "Rural urban planning under growth constraints. The rural outskirts of Geneva and Luxembourg on French territory" by Joël Idt, Camille Le Bivic, and Antoine Pauchon, documents urbanization processes in rural areas marked by population growth and significant land consumption. The authors highlight the prevalence of generic urban planning tools despite the specific nature of the rural context and the difficulties posed by institutional fragmentation in managing and addressing the problems generated by growth. While the actors, taken individually, do not have sufficient financial, institutional, and technical capacities to act, the authors report on the ability to build strong cooperation between organizations and at different territorial levels. The fourth article, "The revitalization of town centers in Livradois Forez: urban planning projects shaped by the rural context?" by Yoan Miot and Sarah Dubeaux, examines an experiment in revitalizing town centers led by a regional nature park. Focusing on the scale of the urban planning project (whereas the literature on rural urban planning has tended to focus on planning approaches), the article confirms findings already documented on the unique characteristics of planning approaches in rural contexts, such as the weakness of engineering and financing, and the close proximity between elected officials and residents. It goes beyond these findings by showing how the activity of urban planning professionals is being reconfigured, giving rise to a form of rural project management that differs from urban project management, in response to systems of actors and methods of project development and implementation that are unique to the rural context. The fifth article, "Supporting citizen initiatives as part of a rural community revitalization project: the case of Volonne" by Séverine Bonnin-Oliveira and Emeline Hatt, analyzes the institutionalization of citizen participation in a rural community revitalization project. Following on from the creation of an eco-neighborhood in the town center, the two authors document a proliferation of resident initiatives in a wide variety of areas. However, these initiatives appear fragile due to the forms they take, their ability to endure over time, and the growing difficulty for the municipal institution and elected officials to coordinate, support, and accompany them. They highlight how, as elsewhere, citizen participation and engagement in local projects and policies call for a transformation of the relationship between elected officials and citizens. Finally, the last article, "The operationalization of spatialized strategic planning on the Corsican coast through the prism of urban planning" by Véronique Venturini and Caroline Tafani, is a methodological proposal for identifying developable land within already urbanized areas. Faced with the observation of weak territorial planning in the constrained rural space that is Corsica, the two authors construct tools to better identify non-urbanized spaces in urban tasks, thus opening up the possibility of reduced land consumption.

Beyond questions of method, these articles underlyingly show that while rurality is a concept covering a diversity of types of spaces, analyzing urban planning activity through this territorial prism makes it possible to reveal unique practices and activities. Indeed, in this issue, the rural areas studied by the authors appear to be torn between two poles: on the one hand, rural areas structured around small centers marked by revitalization issues, and on the other, municipalities under urban influence faced with the management of growth and land consumption. However, despite this territorial diversity, commonalities in urban planning practices emerge. First, the systems of actors, characterized by their fragility and distributed powers, necessarily require the development of cooperation. At the heart of these partnerships are actors that are relatively undocumented—regional nature parks, local authorities, urban planning agencies, and departmental territorial engineering agencies, etc.—in analyses of the processes of spatial transformation in urban areas. For example, around 40% of Regional Nature Parks carry out actions in the field of urban planning (planning, operational action and experimentation in the areas of densification and the fight against urban sprawl, the revitalization of towns and mobility) (FPNR, 2014). Similarly, for many years, the Councils for Architecture, Urban Planning, and the Environment have been developing rural urban planning actions in many departments. It is noteworthy that these initiatives and reflections on urban planning in rural areas are led by specific actors who are less present in urban areas.

Secondly, in a context of close proximity between elected officials and residents, urban planning professionals are heavily invested in working methods to engage and involve local actors in project processes. Here again, the case studies show the ability of actors—elected officials and technicians—to call on ad hoc expertise but also to invent methods to respond to this challenge. Finally, the articles in this issue reveal that the actors in charge of transforming and managing rural areas are succeeding in using generic urban planning tools to develop projects and actions that respond to a variety of challenges. This demonstrates the flexibility of the legal, technical, and economic frameworks of urban planning, contrary to calls for dedicated instruments for rural areas.

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Publiée le 20 November 2023