Towards New Paths for Regional and Territorial Development in Rural Areas

Abstract

The aim of this article is to shed some light on issues of territorial development and of rural development and to identify what links and opposes them. Indeed, everything pushes towards joining these two dimensions, which for a long time seemed disconnected. On the one hand, the policies targeting rural areas explicitly include the territorial dimension, while the distinction between rural and urban is getting blurred. In the meantime, decentralization, subsidiarity, the regionalization of agriculture, short circuits and local foods take place in parallel with the generalization of an urban model. Finally, we find that regional sciences are paying increasing attention to rural and agricultural dimensions, while studies concerning rural questions are starting to consider territorial issues. The first section of the article provides a critical presentation and attempts to define and distinguish the notions of development, territory and the rural. The second section addresses questions of regional and territorial development by presenting the main theories and public policies and concludes with a discussion about the possibilities of reconciling the theories and the policies. The third section follows the same structure, applied to the question of rural development, from analyses to grass-roots policies.     

Comparing Communities—The Limits of Typology

Across the disciplines, communities and identities are usually classified into general categories, such as ethnic, tribal, territorial, civic, religious or political communities/identities. This may be useful in many instances to structure the field and highlight certain distinctive features. But, as this contribution will argue, such typologies do not provide a sound basis for comparison. This holds true both for intercultural and for interdisciplinary comparison. For instance, religion was configured rather differently in ancient Rome, late Antique Christianity and early Islam, and each of them differed fundamentally from our modern concept of religion (as opposed to a secular sphere). The same applies to ethnicity. Likewise, historians and social anthropologists (and even specific schools within the disciplines) operate with often rather differently configured concepts in this area. In fact, most actual communities are framed by more than one “vision of community”; they are rarely only ethnic, religious or political. Their shared frames of reference can be compared: for instance, ancestral lineages, supernatural origins, sacred places, shared history, tribal solidarities, legal practices, exchange networks or outside perceptions. Such frames of references of course overlap and typically create more than one level of identification. This contribution will take the example of the new peoples and powers that emerged after the end of the Roman Empire in the West (such as Goths, Franks and Anglo-Saxons). What shaped these communities, and how did ethnic, territorial, religious and political identifiers interact in the process?     

La métropolisation à l’aune de la ‘loi’ taille/rang : Le cas Canadien, 1971–2001

Metropolization and the rank/size ’law‘: the Canadian case, 1971–2001 There is currently considerable interest in the process of metropolization. One of the consequences of this process, observed by numerous researchers, is the slower growth and even decline of small and medium cities. From a theoretical point of view, this process is compatible with endogenous growth theory: metropolitan areas offer economic actors certain key factors (access to information, to global networks, etc.) that smaller cities cannot. Concurrently, however, there is a resurgence of interest in Zipf's law and, more generally, in the stability of urban hierarchies. These two bodies of work appear to be in contradiction. However, using Canadian data from 1971 to 2001, we show that whilst metropolization is indeed occurring, this is not necessarily incompatible with a regular urban hierarchy. Indeed, if it is assumed that Zipf's rank‐size rule applies to urban systems in stable socio‐economic contexts, and that this regularity can be disrupted by fundamental social and economic changes, then the current wave of metropolization can be interpreted as a re‐ordering of cities in the face of the major social and economic changes of the 1980s and 1990s, which may eventually lead to a new equilibrium compatible with Zipf's law.     

Une Histoire de L’universalité des Matrices Mathématiques

International matrix theory of the 1930s is influenced by multiple phenomena and may be analyzed by looking at how local practices were globalized via pathways which manifested a short-term reappropriation between the two world wars of work developed over the long term. This article interrogates the constitution of the universality of matrix terminology and focuses particularly on phenomena of the collective circulation of texts which present cultural aspects proper to networks with complex identities.