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Today, a new relationship seems to be woven between city and nature. This article identifies the elements on which this recent interest for nature in the city is based. It explores several tracks: the increase in environmental awareness, the effects of the urbanization process and the dissemination of new information and communication technologies, the awareness of the benefits of nature. It examines the plural character of nature in the city and highlights the different functions performed by the plants in the city. It concludes on the quest for a new harmony between the city and nature and on unthinking public policies on nature in the city.

Understanding the internal structure of cities is an important problem in urban economics. The interaction between major employment locations plays an important role in shaping the city and how households and firms locate. The distribution of employment in urban areas has been studied by several researchers from theoretical and empirical perspectives. The objective of this paper is to study the distribution of employment in the city of Lille in order to identify the most important secondary business districts (SBD). Such identification is an important step in understanding how these centers influence the urban form and how they should be taken into account in transport and urban policies. We do not only consider areas with large employment densities, we also focus on those areas that have an influence on the spatial distribution of employment. The literature review on this question shows the evolution of the concepts and the difficulties in reaching a consensus around the definition of a sub-center. Based on some relevant works, one can define a subcenter as a city with (i) a (relatively) high influence on the global distribution of the density of employment in a metropolitan area and (ii) a significant influence on the density of employment of its neighborhood. The technical difficulty is to isolate the influence of the main business center (the city center), and focus on the effects produced by the multiple business subcenters. We use statistical methods that are suitable for this problem and obtain a set of results confirming the polycentric structure of the city of Lille and showing how the commune of Roubaix (and Tourcoing) plays a particularly important influence. On average, moving away from a business subcenter decreases employment density by about 20%.

Over the past 10 years, many French local authorities have initiated brand strategies to strengthen the attractiveness of their territory and the links between the stakeholders. In addition, these brands constitute real collective projects that are expressed through the development of proximity such as cognitive, institutional or organizational. The territorial reform, by the law NOTRe (New Territorial Organization of the Republic) effective from 1 January 2016, reducing the regions from 22 to 13, questions the future of these brands and the activation of the proximity on which these collective brands are based. The local economy grid (Boschma, 2005) is used to identify the links between the actors involved in brand strategy and their intensities. This work updates the possible leverages to make a brand evolve in a context of changing geographical and administrative scopes for the regions. The case study is about a regional brand. This research is based on a qualitative study among the stakeholders of the Auvergne Nouveau Monde brand and on a quantitative survey of the inhabitants of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. It allows, among six possible evolution scenarios resulting from the thematic content analysis, to identify the one considered most likely by using it as a key to understanding the different dimensions of proximity. It provides practitioners with suggestions on how to consider the sustainability of a brand by focusing strongly on social proximity, which has not yet been given much prominence in work that favours an organizational or political approach to the issue.

In a context of profound change in the labour market, we can observe a concentration of innovation-related activities in urban centres. Among these, coworking spaces (ECW) encourage the idea of sharing and openness, changing the future of communities. The literature primarily addresses the economic and entrepreneurial dimension of this phenomenon, with few studies on the links between coworking spaces and the city. This article sheds new light on the relations between territory and innovation, taking a spatial and urban planning approach. From a critical review of the literature, we examine the links between coworking spaces and the city in three ways: the receiving city, the city as a territorial resource, and the city as a field of action for public policies. We then identify the main urbanism issues (embeddedness, urban project, mobilities), leading to a redefinition of urban planning processes from three angles: regulatory, project and tactical.

In 2010, the cultural cluster of the Articulteurs is the winner of the DATAR's “clusters prize”. This cultural structure then aims to give substance to the concept of the “rêvalisable” by supporting a project of experimental laboratory of collective entrepreneurship at the service of the development of the rural territory. Under this particular case study, we seek to understand how a group can undertake an innovation at the service of the territory into “solidarity-based environment.” To do this, we show that if the geography of innovation is likely to bring elements of understanding, it requires an additional study of nature and the conditions for development of collective entrepreneurship. This article is partially in line with critical analyses about the school of the evolutionary economic geography.

We propose in this paper a set of indicators measuring the dynamic resilience of territories. These indicators are based on the economic dominance theory framework. We apply them to study the European technology market over the period 2000-2011.