Geographer, Guillaume Faburel is interested in metropolises and their limits in the context of future resource limitations.
Your latest book is titled “Urban indecency for a new pact with the living”, is rurality more of a model for the future?
In metropolises we experience a sort of disconnection from life, a disjunction: we no longer know where what we eat comes from, how the energy we consume is produced… But there is a sort of unspeakable in raise the question of cities, their sprawl, their density, their size. It is a Gordian knot because humanity was built on the idea that happiness was in cities, places of emancipation, of social ascension, these are millennia of belief. Raising the question of cities means reshuffling a lot of cards. However, today we are witnessing the seventh wave of return to rurality, something that is progressing quietly, but which definitely exists.
You suggest a demographic rebalancing…
Yes, rather than a form of metropolization of the world. We have examples of territories, “bio-regions” which live around town centers and still correspond to habits, with still existing socialization networks, empowering know-how, a culture of the hand… These are places with potential for densification. If we project ourselves to 2050, we know that everything will become tense and developmentalism and croissantism will no longer be the operating models. I am of course not advocating the disappearance of the flow of grants from the State to communities, but they have been boosted by grants and, it is certain, we will witness a paradigm shift in the years to come.
-Are there already alternatives?
Of course, in the Vallée Longue (between Gard and Lozère), the Cévennes Rural University has been working since 2019 to share know-how and knowledge on approaches to preserving and restoring environments, particularly around the Cévennes chestnut grove. . In Brittany, the Bruded network (like Brittany and rural and urban for sustainable development) brings together small rural municipalities and intercommunalities and allows elected officials to share expertise.
Will this seventh wave of return to the countryside become more pronounced?
The first movement was that of the Maos in 1968, very political, with the desire to return to live and work in the country, the 4th and 5th waves were marked by fairly well-off socio-professional categories… Today, 50 years later, post- confinement, it's more pyrotechnic! With more feminization, more young people, and ultimately a constellation of forms of habitat, some 1,300 eco-places in France for example. We remember the fact that 100,000 people leave France's metropolises each year. This phenomenon will accelerate.
