Topic

Thinking the "chains of transitions "

This symposium aims to question the consequences of this economic path within the context of rural territories and its emerging living practices, and to explore its implications for public policy and professional practices. The point of departure is the observation that rural space is a privileged space for emerging new economies. 

Key questions which could be developed are:

• How do rural areas present a singular potential to initiate an economy of ‘after-growth’? What would be the modus operandi in terms of spatial planning?
• How are they occasionally an experiment to find other economic practices allowing a challenge to this logic of dominant growth?
• How can disciplines in the field of space and design be associated with this type of reflection, taking into account the role of the actors who are engaged in the transformation of rural areas ?

Today, these questions echo the debate on the various forms of "transition" (Chabot, 2016) which currently occur in contemporary society. In this case, it is the issue of economic transition” that will be tackled in relation with a "chain of transitions" which today transforms the overall base of space design.

Imagining a new "economic narrative" in the age of energy transition

Since the 1980s, the growth of globalization and “financialization” have increased the power of neoliberal logics and largely contributed to the transformation of urbanization processes towards “metropolisation”. One of the consequences of this logic at the territorial scale is the decrease of the economic vitality of the numerous settlements – small towns and villages - which were not geographically connected to the flows of “metropolisation”. Regarding this issue, one of the main challenges of our time is to curb this huge “expropriation process” which occurred at the territorial scale, in order to rethink the geographical and economic dialectic which yesterday commanded the relation between city and territory. In short, the goal is to show how rural areas and territorial pattern/connection could initiate another type of economic regime/ system, another way of dwelling in the context of “metropolisation”.

The energy transition is another key lever to approach economic transition in terms of dwelling in relation to the territory. Questioning and changing our economic system means reconsidering the evolution of the energy model on which contemporary communities live. As Agnès Sinaï (2015) explains, we cannot separate the process of economic growth from “its” physical and energy substrate.

The field of the bio-economy, developed by pioneer works of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1979) and René Passet (1979 ) helps to introduce this link. The bio-economy notion is based on two principles revealing the link between communities, settlements and their economic activities:

• the search for process and for organizational principles going against  the use of high technologies which reinforce the logic of “hyper-technicisation” at the world scale ; 
• the restoration of social links and ecosystems in order to promote various forms of a solidarity / citizen economy, in contrast with forms of overproduction and overconsumption engendered by the neoliberal economic system.

Instead of territorial competition pattern based on growth and overproduction, the notion of bio-economy constitutes an opening towards other “economic software” conferring rural territories another role, another status. This notion goes against neoliberal systems of production and consumption by exploring a set of proposals from social and solidarity economy and by contributing to a plural economy (Ndiaye, 2011). At another level, this challenge of the economic transition is an opportunity to imagine a new “economic narrative”, as Eloi Laurent (2016) suggests.

 Regarding work engaged by ERPS and Alter-rurality networks, this conference will give an opportunity to review several notions: solidarity and territorial equity (Sery and Saunier, 2016), "city / countryside pact" (Guillot, 2011), identification of an "alter-rurality", as mentioned by Pieter Versteegh and Chris Younes (2012).