In 2019, throughout the congress of mayors, Emmanuel Macron identified the danger of a tear between metropolis and countryside. The sociologist Jean Viard offers his leads for a redevelopment of the territory with a human face.
Why this opposition between France of wifi and France of rooster coops?
Since 2007, massive metropolises have accelerated their transformation, their attractiveness and their financial energy with a rise in land and rents which has pushed out essentially the most fragile. This upheaval offers folks the sensation that town is stealing their wealth, when the truth is, the other is going on. With roughly 40% of the inhabitants, the eight main French cities produce 61% of the Gross Home Product (GDP). Wealth creation due to this fact takes place extra in cities, particularly since it’s tertiary wealth which doesn’t want staff. As we speak there are extra staff than peasants within the countryside. Quite than having a bodybuilder who will take you 20 m², town prefers to have 5 worldwide attorneys with a hypermajorated lease!
Do city dwellers appear to think about nature an increasing number of?
It’s not the identical nature. City folks are inclined to suppose, since they develop carrots on their balconies, that they might handle on their very own, with out peasants. They only don’t understand the tonnages … It should all the time be remembered that in France there are 16 million homes with gardens and 500,000 farms. There have been three million in 1945. However we’re in a peasant archipelago as a result of the farms not contact. Between two farms there may be now a housing property. Whoever goes to town, after having inherited a chunk of land, places it up on the market to make three homes. So we blended the territory. The speech which consists in saying that the countryside belongs to the peasants is fake! Peasants have all the time been a minority within the countryside the place there have been extra artisans and merchants.
Doesn't residing in a rustic property make you a rustic dweller?
A lot of the conflicts right now come up in these blended territories with various kinds of habitat, the place the landscapes are sometimes stunning. This attracts secondary residents, well-to-do city dwellers who can work at home and peri-urban dwellers who can’t afford the rest and who’ve chosen housing near a practice station, the motorway and a grocery store. Nevertheless, they aren’t built-in into the village. We now have positioned above the id territory, communal or parish, an enormous system of transport community with out respecting any municipal border, no panorama. It’s simply technocratic performance.
Does this social range give start to a brand new neighborhood?
Sure, like that of the yellow vests. The hole between the wealthy and the poor is far higher in the identical territory than between territories. You’ll be able to't say “Paris is cash and the countryside is poverty”. That is fully mistaken! Salaries within the capital are, on common, 26% increased than the common earnings of non-Parisians. However rents are 50% increased … In web disposable earnings, we’re poorer in Paris.
What venture might create a political area exterior the metropolises?
We now have 33,000 municipalities left. We now have constructed communities of unelected communes and nobody is aware of anymore whether or not to hold on to the departments or drop them. However the weight of our native political class is so heavy that we’ve not modified the organizations. Our mayors can’t take it anymore of their too small city halls, which aren’t on the size of recent life. Every French individual travels a mean of 50 km per day. This determines what a political area needs to be. I've been saying for a very long time that we’ve to redraw the playing cards round our schools, as a result of it's a neighborhood of life. It’s crucial at hand over a cantonal mayor elected by direct suffrage and that the city halls of the canton grow to be cantonal city halls, as in Paris or Marseille.
Redrawing the territory, is it additionally preserving the earth?
Like Jules Ferry, I feel “a citizen is somebody who lives and works”. Nevertheless, 61% of French folks vote in a municipality by which they don’t work. We will not communicate of residents, however slightly of tenant associations. The peasants nonetheless maintain 53% of the homeland, forests representing 25%. De Gaulle sanctified magnificence by claiming that it was superior to property. This has resulted within the creation of regional and nationwide parks. For him, magnificence was a superb of the Republic. The identical have to be finished right now with the sources of life, the earth and the forest, which assure the way forward for future generations.
What do you think about for peri-urban areas?
It’s crucial to herald, for instance, trams and permit the supermarkets to have parking under or above, however extra essentially subsequent to it. The 20% of agricultural land that exists round cities have to be densified, not less than for half a century.
While you quote France from villages, which do you consider? That of the 60s?
It’s that of a tradition that makes folks belong to a municipality – within the spatial and human sense – and know its historical past. The village is a neighborhood of males who’ve shared pursuits and expertise of life and who defend themselves. As was the working class within the purple mild districts.
The commercial revolution signed the loss of life warrant for the marketing campaign. Will the inexperienced revolution result in a return to the earth?
I feel agriculture is the way forward for the world. It’s important to be a cultural curator and a scientific innovator. How you can produce organically and technologically? How you can deal with, due to the web, his subject to the closest m², the place an sickness begins? As we speak, we deal with all yr and all plots. It’s like strolling right into a pharmacy to purchase all of the medication to guard your self from all sicknesses! That is not a method of working, as a result of with satellites, we will detect illnesses as quickly as they seem. Agriculture has a terrific future, however not essentially with right now's farmers. That is what is going on in Italy, the place 30% of younger farmers should not heirs and it really works very properly! I don't need to save the peasantry, I need to save the earth.
