Torre Andre, UMR SAD-APT INRA INA PG, Paris, France
Land-use conflict and tension in rural and peri-urban areas - An analysis based on different French case studies (assigned to theme
Rural, natural and peri-urban land appears to have become the object of important conflicts and tensions because of its multi functional nature. Indeed, it can serve as a medium for three types of functions that imply opposing uses and as a result lead to differences and oppositions between the local economic and social actors: an economic and productive function, a residential and recreational function (the countryside as a living environment for permanent or temporary residents) and a nature conservation function (protection of bio-diversity, of the cultural, natural and landscape heritage). The users of rural land (farmers, craftsmen, neo-rural residents, tourists, migrants, residents of urban peripheries, workers, public enterprises or services…) often have different and even opposing views concerning how this land should be used and developed and concerning the access infrastructures to the land in question. These tensions can turn into conflicts. However, the increase in conflictual relations in the French rural and peri-urban areas is often alleged but seldom proved in reality. Indeed, although the « problems » related to questions of neighbourhood and of multi land use are deemed important and even central in the procedures of local or territorial governance, the studies dedicated to conflicts in natural, rural and peri-urban areas remain scarce. It is in order to better understand and analyse the conflicts that have emerged in rural and peri- urban areas that the programme of research on neighbourhood and land-use conflicts has been developed. This programme, which has been jointly developed, in France, by various pluridisciplinary teams from public research organisations (INRA, Cemagref, CIRAD, CNRS, Engref, Enitac, INA-PG), consists in taking these conflicts seriously and examining them closely. It is intentionally based on an empirical and deductive approach and aims to analyse how conflicts emerging on the French territory develop and how attempts to solve them are undertaken. This research programme has mobilised a number of empirical studies concerning different zones that are deemed representative of the national territory. The first section of this article presents our approach in terms of conflict definition, of the hypotheses proposed by researchers and of the methodology they adopted. In the second section, we examine the results obtained by these studies, before drawing general conclusions concerning the generic nature of land-use and neighbourhood conflicts in rural and peri-urban areas (section 3).
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