Rural areas: a report recommends moving away from the "all urban" approach

"Today, rural areas can no longer be thought of as a uniform, residual space, necessarily on the margins of development dynamics and in a situation of dependence on urban areas," notes the first report of the Scientific Council of France Ruralités (CSFR).

Created in August 2023, this organization bringing together 19 researchers is a place for scientific debate and support for public policies.

Rural areas are both the site of "increasingly visible protests" such as the "yellow vests" and of often fantasized natural spaces coveted by city dwellers.

According to the INSEE, they represent 88% of French territory and 33% of the population.

"The French countryside was initially reduced to its agricultural function before, under the effect of urbanization and metropolitanization, a reading became established in which the urban became the dominant prism of planning policies," the authors observe.

The adoption of a territorial division into "urban areas" and then "urban attraction areas" has contributed to "reducing the place of rural areas in planning priorities", relegating them "to the background of territorial policies".

While some countrysides "experience strong attractiveness", linked to industry, tourism or residential dynamics, others are faced with "phenomena of abandonment".

Their representation oscillates between a "romantic" and "idealized" vision conveyed after May 68, and a "miserabilist" perception, which assimilates the countryside to spaces of relegation, popularized by the concept of "peripheral France" of the geographer Christophe Guilluy.

"Faced with these binary and often reductive representations (...), sociologist Benoît Coquard invites us to step outside the prism of the urban to think about the countryside in its diversity and complexity," the authors write.

"Rather than viewing them solely as areas lacking jobs, services, or mobility, this approach invites us to recognize their specificities, their strengths, and their own dynamics," they continue.

A perspective that also calls for "rethinking public policies" so that they are "no longer designed solely according to criteria of competitiveness or attractiveness dictated by metropolitan logic."

In fact, rural areas play a key role in the ecological transition, as they contain "most of the country's natural and agricultural areas," the authors emphasize, calling on public authorities to "change their perspective" and "promote the complementarities between towns and countryside."