Contenu du sommaire : Agricultures et villes : des articulations renouvelées

Key discipline in the Vidalian geography in the times of farm modernization, rural geography has had to renew its scientific framework in the light of the urbanization of the countryside. The concept of territorial resource opens the way to thinking of possible linkages between cities, countryside and agriculture. The challenge has become one of scrutinizing the signs of what is a second “rural renaissance.” The trends involve substitution by farmers and agriculture, as territory-based actors, of a proactive dynamics of construction of town-country relations in place of various forms of acculturation. These developments are brought out in the five papers of this issue "Town and agriculture". This introduction points out the methodological approaches they bring to these studies (phenomenology, networks, inversion of perspectives) and themes (publicization, food supply). The continual adaptation of farming to urban expectations is shifting from a context of domination towards the construction of transactions, raising the question of its irreducibility in the face of the urban world. Agriculture and the countryside seem more than ever to be renewing the ways in which they fit into overall society.

The paper aims to show how farmers deal with urbanization at the farm scale. On the one hand, agriculture, farmed landscapes and the farmers are an essential part of the countryside, the basis for defining it and core of its social representations. On the other hand, under the urban-industrial hypothesis, following a period of modernization agriculture is now being challenged by urbanization. This is happening in a triple process: urban sprawl, not only in peri-urban areas but also in the villages; diversification of rural population (back-to-the-land movement); and diffusion of the urban models and values, even in farmers' own minds. The question is therefore to find how urban influences are at work in places that, whether nearby or far away from cities, remain country landscapes. Agriculture is taking on more and more functions considered as urban because they were initiated by urban dwellers' needs or aspirations, before being recognised as legitimate by the whole society. In some cases, opportunities opened up by urban desires are explicitly marketed by farm businesses as diversification projects, but the mainstream is made of rural-urban spatial designs that can be understood as agricultural or urban externalities. The former are produced by farmers (hedgerow landscapes, drinkable water, etc.), the second are tolerated or accepted as inclusions in the farmed countryside's framework (windmills, hamlet dwellings, highways, etc.). Thirteen farmers (men and women) were surveyed in three local areas in Brittany, Normandy and Poitou-Charentes, by means of “wellington boot interviews”, over the farm landscapes. Spatial features of urbanity are numerous, diffuse and generally well integrated in the landscapes and farm systems surveyed. For these features the paper proposes a classification, a map made on a single farm and therefore a topological analysis of their inclusion in the spatial system of the farm, stressing the potential of geographical analysis for understanding agri-urban interactions at local scale. Most of the farmers questioned give evidence of their skilfulness in making their farm ready for inclusion of exogenous trends that have or will have a direct impact on the place where they work: that is how they generate a new countryside, hybridized with urbanity, which anyone can find at least partly familiar.

This paper deals with the process of peri-urban farmland publicization. The question of publicization of public space lies at the heart of urban studies. In France another process, the publicization of countryside, involves the engagement of the urban population with housing, leisure or tourism in rural spaces. After presenting two major scholarly approaches in a literature review, the authors construct an analytical framework. This framework mobilizes the tools of urban studies to gain understanding of the publicization process when it is applied to farmland. It is deployed along three main lines (public policies, spatial practices and public debate), two spatial scales (territory and place) and five analytical dimensions (legal, social, politic, historic and economic). Applied to a case study, the Lunellois in the South of France (between Montpellier and Nîmes), this framework reveals a new relationships between city and countryside. Agricultural activity manifests a specific peri-urban dynamics. The authors end by exploring the rise of a new type of public space in peri-urban areas. In certain conditions, farmland can play a role in the affirmation of peri-urban public spaces.

Innovations in agro-food systems based on environmental and sustainable values are growing in European peri-urban countrysides. Networking seems to have become a major tool for the diffusion of those innovations. Examining the case of several networks of organic farmers in the Stockholm metropolitan area, this study aims to analyse patterns of the diffusion of organic farming understood as an innovation, using the framework of the actor-network theory. Results show that networks support innovative practices in the agricultural and social fields by adding economic and social value that improve the viability of farms. Nevertheless, organic farmers' networks remain marginal in Sweden, thus appear barely able to gather farmers together and to redefine the quality of food on local bases. Other patterns are identified as key factors in the diffusion of organic farming, such as geographical proximity or local agricultural groups.

This article examines the emergence of new supermarket actors involved in local farming ; on the basis of a case study on the O'Tera stores in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, conducted by a team of researchers from a variety of laboratories in the region. Can these stores reshape the market relations between towns and an agriculture whose dynamics is instrumental in co-producing countrysides ? What are the relationships between these newcomers and their agricultural partners, the impact on customers' behaviours ? Is it accelerating the processes of insertion farmsteads in their marketing territory or, on the contrary, is it an aggressive way of capturing the value generated by the new craze of city-dwellers for relocating their food supplies ? These short food supply chains often raise interest, and sometimes opposition, because they are a new type of linkage within food systems. The new practices introduced by the marketing strategies of the “farm supermarket” upset the balance by applying supermarket know-how to short circuits as well as marketing processes, and are a challenge to existing networks for market control. The study on both producers and customers makes it possible to sketch out the overall trends in the evolution of that type of firm (a hybrid model) and to point to a certain number of short and medium term effects on agricultural dynamics.

Following ambitious objectives set by the 'Grenelle Agreement on Environment', local stakeholders have organised the shortening and greening of food chains that supply public catering. However, they have often kept only one side of the objectives, either local or ecological, creating confusion but allowing a wider space to take position. Socially accepted and politically booming, local food supply chains have stimulated much talking and writing but have not always been turned into reality. This paper deals with a case study in western France, around Le Mans, where several initiatives were taken to supply public catering with local high quality products in the 2000s. It highlights actors' interactions : and the balance of power between urban and rural sectors but also between forms of agriculture whose qualities and locations vary greatly. We focus especially on one of these initiatives : an ambitious project of local organic vegetable supply, in the way that this project sheds light on the positions of other stakeholders within the same territory. First, the growing institutional and scientific interests in local supply chains are presented. Second, the Sarthe case study analysis shows how a fully relevant project gave birth only to scattered and pale copies of what was intended. This leads to a discussion about the difficulties of achieving full dimension proximity.