“Every year 100,000 people in France leave the metropolises”, Guillaume Faburel, geographer questions the place of cities

Guillaume Faburel est géographe à l’Université de Lyon 2. Pierre-Antoine Pluquet

Geographer, Guillaume Faburel is interested in metropolises and their limits in the context of a limitation of resources to come.

Your latest book is entitled “Urban indecency for a new pact with the living”, rurality is more of a model for the future ?

In metropolises, we experience a kind 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 kind of unspeakable in asking 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 advancement, these are millennia of belief. Asking the question of cities again means reshuffling a lot of cards. But today we are witnessing the seventh wave of a return to rurality, something that is moving forward quietly, but which does exist.

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You suggest a demographic rebalancing…

Yes, rather than a form of metropolization of the world. We have examples of territories, “bio-regions” that live around town centers and still correspond to habits, with still existing socialization networks, self-empowering know-how, a culture of the hand… These are places with a potential for densification. If we project ourselves to 2050, we know that everything will become tense and developmentalism, growth will no longer be the operating models. I am of course not advocating the disappearance of flows of State grants to communities, but they have been bottle-fed on grants and, it is certain, we will witness a paradigm shift in the years to come.

There are 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 Bretagne et rurale et urbaine pour un développement durable) brings together small rural municipalities and inter-municipalities and allows elected officials to share expertise.

Will this seventh wave of return to the countryside increase? ?

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 a feminization, more young people, and finally a constellation of forms of habitat, some 1,300 eco-places in France for example. We remember the fact that 100,000 people leave the metropolises in France every year. This phenomenon will accelerate.

Guillaume Faburel is a professor at the University of Lyon 2 and the author of Indécence urbaine: pour un nouveau pacte avec le vivant, published by Climats in 2023. His previous book Métropoles barbares received the Prix du livre d’écologie politique in 2018. I subscribe to read the rest