Contenu du sommaire

This paper sheds light on how the notion of resilience, in spite of its limitations, may contribute to a better understanding and management of disaster risk. The method used draws on two sites close to the Rhône, where flood hazard is similar to some extent. The first one is located in the municipality of Culoz, close to Lavours Marshes. The other is situated in Chautagne, in the municipality of Chanaz. Yet, the two cases show opposing risk management strategies. Understanding the differences in both risk management and local development policies makes it possible to identify the reshaping of three major approaches to risk prevention. These are: hazard-centred, territory-based, and, today, a resilience-oriented approach. Considering those successive and intertwined risk approaches helps us to understand why the notion of resilience is so polysemic, why it potentially carries so many inherent contradictions and why it is so frequently questioned. Yet, drawing on the same elements, it is possible to defend why an integrated approach of resilience might be useful for understanding and managing risk. It could make both the benefits and shortcomings of disaster risk prevention policies more visible and explicit.

The term Limnosystem is underused term and it suffers from an insufficiently sound conceptual framework of conceptualization. It is too often reduced to the ecosystem approach concerning a lake or to an approach taking in the connections between a lake and its basin. The potential richness of the concept is discussed from the epistemology of other existing terms: the lentic ecosystem favouring biocenosis, the fluvial system favouring biotope, the geosystem inspiring modelling, the hydrosystem created for the river basin. This leads to reconsideration of the spatio-temporal scales in the light of thinking on the closed ecosystem, lake microcosm and endemism, and on the open hydrosystem, up to now looking at tributaries rather than outlets. An attempt is made to frame the classical components of the geosystem, its structure, functioning and behaviour, within the processes of limnological geography which differentiates lakes from ponds and rural pools, searches for discontinuities within water bodies, comparing the relative influences of major processes in stagnant water (forced convection in lakes and great reservoirs, free convection in ponds) and those of the temporal rhythms of mixing (oligo-, di- or mono-mixis in lakes, discontinuous polymixis in ponds, continuous polymixis in pools). Finally, the place of society is discussed, highlighting the mishandling of artificial water bodies in ecosystem- or even hydrosystem-based approaches. The concept of limnic anthroposystem would probably be suitable for resolving this problem. A new definition of the limnosystem is finally suggested.

Although conceptually and empirically the rounded form of the Earth's was no longer in doubt, aerial photography fundamentally transformed the representations of the world. The vertical shots produced for the first time allowed the Earth to be seen in its entirety and helped to forge a new global environmental consciousness. What Denis Cosgrove called "new global spatialities" also represents new modalities of subjectification. With this in mind and to celebrate the Earth Day in 2014, NASA broadcasted an image of the globe made up of tens of thousands of selfies sent by Internet users. By combining the two paradigmatic practices that delimit the field of geographical exploration (representation of the terrestrial globe and selfie), NASA perfectly illustrates the idea of ​​a universal Earth, everywhere habitable and inhabited. On the basis of these elements, this article revisits both the historical links between photography and geography and what I would call vernacular geographical knowledge: the practice of taking selfies. It will then be necessary to show how the image produced by NASA is part of the new ideal of subjectification which makes the Earth object a kind of sovereign everyone is called upon to identify with.

The Paris agglomeration is strengthening its economic attractiveness and becoming more and more specialized in the high status jobs in the service sector. At the same time, the housing prices are increasing and housing supply remains insufficient. In consequence, it is very difficult to reside in this agglomeration, not only for low-income households, but also for middle class ones. This paper aims to analyse the social dynamics outside the agglomeration and to evaluate the links between the places where households live and the places where they work. To live in the urban fringes remains associated, in the French context, to a default choice, even if ongoing gentrification processes appear in the outskirts close to the agglomeration. Using data of French censuses from 1990, this paper shows the social specialization of these outskirts according to the distance to the Paris agglomeration. By observing the trends since 1990, it is clear that the social profile of the urban fringes has deeply changed and that a new socio-spatial divide is appearing. This must also be analysed in terms of socio-spatial inequalities by taking into account the increasing prices of energy and the unequal proximity of the employment centres.