Contenu du sommaire

Fundamentalist geomorphology The religious fundamentalists, especially creationists, take hold of geomorphology to justify a literal reading of the sacred texts of Bible and the Koran. The extent of their efforts, the will to penetrate the social and political field mean that today we cannot ignore the offensive against the “classical” acquired knowledge. This paper shows not only the visible weakness of the textual basis which allows these various attacks, but also the method — more ingenious than one can imagine — used by persons who well know academic codes and exploit theoretical deficiencies of works that are necessarily incomplete.

Rome and globalization This article deals with the globalization as a process that is not exclusively an economic one, which merits a long-term approach. It analyses Rome as a place which has played an historic role in the construction of the global scale. It shows that after having contributed to unifying the “Ancient World System” under the Roman Empire, the “Eternal City” spread out its political and religious influence to the global scale in the beginning of modern times and has become a laboratory of new interactions of scales, generating direct communication between the local and the global. The end of the article presents Rome, marginalized by the second and third globalizations, as a typical example of a world city, but which is not an economic global city. This study is a plea for an approach to globalization which pays attention to its cultural dimension and to the interplay between scales it implies.

The spatial mobilities of international students. Social determinants and articulation of mobility scale The aim of this paper is to attempt to improve knowledge about spatial mobilities and immobilities, whose causes are still rarely investigated. This reflection is based on the case of international students who represent a highly mobile part of the world population. They have crossed borders and covered many kilometres in order to study in a foreign country. Are these very mobile individuals at the international level also mobile at a more local scale during their stay ? The survey shows that students from developed countries (North America, Europe) are more mobile than students from developing and emerging countries (Africa, Asia). This paper investigates the reasons of these disparities analysing the impact of the unequal distribution of social resources between students on their spatial practices. However, these social resources cannot explain all the immobilities regarding the case of Asian students who have not many financial difficulties and who are not very mobile. The key of the spatial mobilities of international students is the meaning attributed by these students to their migration which, with regard to the significance of the stakes involved, do not follow the same practices during the stay. For students from developing and emerging countries, studies and diploma are the aims of their international migration, so leisure mobilities are not the priority, contrary to students from developed countries who decided to study abroad in order to learn a language, discover a country and meet new people, which explains their significant mobility.

Scattered development of settlement and grouping in the Andean's pastoral systems Pastoral systems, which are necessarily extensive, are traditionally characterised by low density of population. This forces shepherds to live in a scattered pattern of settlement (absence of urban areas) and to move around regularly. However, in these pastoral spaces, noticeable phenomena of concentration and grouping are occurring. The Peruvian Andean puna is no exception, and starting about twenty years ago, access to basic modern services and their provision has become available through the appearance of cores of population and weekly communal gatherings which transform mobility patterns and require pastoralists' settlement far from the home pastures. As a consequence, within these pastoral systems, in which itinerancy and housing dispersion constitute the basis of socio-spatial living, the issue arises of reconciling the tendency toward clustering with the practices of cattle breeding. These new forms of mobility and immobility transform the shepherds' territoriality. The cohesion of district and community is strengthened by this phenomenon, to the detriment of the traditional organization based on the agnatic line.

Stages in the structuring of a desert : the Algerian projects and land planning The Algerian Sahara is now urbanized, spatially and economically integrated in the national territory, and its enormous hydrocarbons stocks represent the fundamental base of the Algerian economy. Its present spatial organization is due to the historical evolution of the relationships with the succession of political powers at work in the central Maghreb. Since the Middle Ages, those powers have developed their own specific interactions with the Saharan spaces, based above all on economic reasons and then on essentially political projects. In order to understand the progressive construction of a desert region like the Algerian Sahara, we need to measure the influence of the historical heritages and the spatial mutations brought about by the projects of the political powers in the Northern Maghreb.