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In France, after several decades of belief in the advent of a post-industrial economy, the question of the future of industry arises again. Industry has not disappeared and still shaping many territories. After the economic crisis of 2008, discourses relayed on them were often reductive or fatalistic. To objectify these discourses, we propose to analyze what are the French industrial territories. Assuming that territories are largely dependent on their past, this article provides an analysis that takes into account local trajectories over the last fifty years. It draws on two complementary analytical grids. Based on a comparison of the share of industrial employment in 1975 and 2012, the first distinguishes three major types of industrial living areas: ex-industrial, tradi-industrial and neo-industrial. Thanks to a study of the evolution of industrial employment and total employment, the second one furthers this first typology, by revealing four major forms of trajectories that are expansion (increase in total employment and in industrial employment), industrialization (decrease in total employment, increase in industrial employment), mutation (increase in total employment, decrease in industrial employment) and shrinkage (decrease in total employment and decrease in industrial employment). We study these trajectories for each types of living areas on three sub-periods (1975-1990; 1990-2007; 2007-2012). Then, we show the multiplicity of sequences and the influence limited of structural factors (macro-economic evolution, sectoral structure, spatial dimension). Considering that not all of industrial territories are in shrinkage especially over the three sub-periods, our analysis highlights the diversity of (past and present) situations, which conduct us to differentiate challenges that they face.

This paper examines the links between scientific activities and territorial development. For a territory, particularly a metropolitan area, an economic development strategy including scientific activities focuses on two objectives: on the one hand, international scientific networking (ISN), and on the other hand, local fertilization (LF). After reviewing of the different potential ISN-LF combinations, we empirically test one specific configuration, the ISN-LF coexistence. The analysis is based on a double case study, both thematic and geographical: the Brest (France) and Bergen (Norway) sites in the field of marine sciences. Three methods are successively implemented: two combined and comparative methods (spatialized bibliometrics and interview survey) and a regionalized input-output modelling. The different results are contrasted in order to appreciate how ISN can exist and develop while strengthening the LF dynamics, and to identify the nurturing conditions, or conversely the drags. Several conclusions are drawn: first, the ISN-LF articulation scheme appears to be different in the two territories studied, despite a similar ISN performance. Secondly, the significant and actual performing of an ISN-LF coexistence scheme where ISN strengthens the LF (Bergen case) seems to be a stabilizing factor, or even improving factor for the ISN performance, and not a deteriorating factor. Recommendations are suggested: relying on the effectiveness of incentive funding mechanisms for researchers and firms; acting firstly on future researchers, by learning, in order to increase the propensity to collaborate and to develop a common collaborative culture; the need for a stronger presence of transfer organizations within the local scientific community; and finally the need for a matching and an intentional adaptation of the research and innovation policies to the main local economic sectors.

We investigate the factors of access itinerary choice to information for vacant rental housing in Cameroon. The theoretical perspective chosen is the modern information analysis. That means search behaviour for rental housing is highlighted under the assumption of imperfect information. The study begins to emphasize four access itineraries to information according actors approached: formal real estate intermediaries, informal real estate intermediaries, social network and family. Then, we look into factors of each itinerary choice by formalizing a nested multinomial model. Data collected provide from a survey of rental housing market across the city of Douala. This study-case shows us that information dispersion disproves the rational approach of residential real estate market mechanisms, in urban context experienced by the weight of informal production. Thus, the access itinerary to information chosen is influenced by anticipations of financial and opportunity costs related to search time, income, education level and household size. Furthermore, in a context of informal housing production, three main ways are used to get information: family members living under the same roof, social networks and informal real estate brokers.The results suggest three policy interventions. First, the implementation of a formal housing production framework would improve the stakeholders coordination and, ultimately, reduce information dispersion. Then, policies should focus to reinforce the diffusion technical capacities of formal real estate agents. Finally, the popularization of new communication tools is required to share information about vacant rental housings.

In the current context of widespread mobility (of goods, knowledge, but also of consumers), every type of territory has to deal with the multiplicity of development challenges: the competitiveness of industrial activities, but also tourist and residential attractiveness. This paper discusses the development of peripheral regions in particular and presents the case of the Gruyère region (canton of Fribourg, Switzerland). Like many peripheral regions, this region has experienced a dynamic of exogenous development, based first on industrial activities and then on residential activities. Land was a generic resource for the development of these activities. Tensions emerged in the Gruyère region because this development required an extensive urbanization. Beyond the resolution of tensions, the potential of synergies and creation of value based on the rural heritage of the trajectory emerged. Indeed, in today's globalized economy, land contributes to the creation of economic value through its symbolic properties: landscape and environmental properties are specific resources and now support various types of economic activities. An “enlarged anchoring milieu” , which promotes a qualitative development, is currently under development. In other words, regarding urban-rural relationships at the national scale, the milieu works to endogenize development. Its major challenge is the preservation of the region's rural heritage resources, including land. Indeed, the milieu realizes that the legacy of the rural trajectory of La Gruyère plays a role in its current competitiveness and will play an even more important role in the future. This case shows that innovation, in addition to being at the origin of development and concerning basic activities (most of the time, theoretically, productive), also concerns other activities, and/or the ways in which they are coordinated.

This article deals with the implementation of the agroecological transition in the French West Indies. To address this challenge, a viability model is suggested. This approach offers an original framework to highlight agroecosystems dynamics by allowing consideration of simultaneously economic and agronomic dimensions. This holistic approach to agroecosystems is designed at the farming system scale. Farming systems, which are thought as socio-ecosystems (i.e., ecological systems inextricably connected to a socio-economic matrix), represent an essential component of the agricultural sector. Farming systems are a strategic level on which to tackle the different components of viability from a holistic point of view. Farming systems are at the crossroads of agro-technical, organizational, institutional and territorial innovations. They also constitute a consistent level on which to address the issues of complexity and uncertainty. A viability model with target (reaching a high soil quality threshold) is designed, tested and supports operational objectives. The viability analysis enables to answer different questions relating to a given state (i.e. initial state) concerning possible futures. It aims to reveal the set of decision-making rules to be followed to ensure a viable evolution of farming systems. The viability model is applied for banana farming systems. The model results allow to define to what extent a farm can undertake its agroecological transition. It helps to assess the costs and duration of the agroecological transition considering farmers' choices (practices and crops). It shows that postponing the implementation of viable decision rules is costly. The more farmers postpone, the longer it will take for their system to recover viable properties and the more it will cost.

The contractualisation of the French regions with the project territories has changed since 2016, following the regional elections in December 2015 and the change of perimeter of some regions. The homogeneous panorama of the previous contractualisation, based on projects territories organized in « pays », has been followed by a varied landscape that rests this contractualization sometimes on « pays » or « Pôles d'Équilibre Territoriaux et Ruraux » (PETR), sometimes on public institutions of intercommunal cooperation (EPCI) (communities of municipalities or agglomeration), especially since their enlargement resulting from the NOTRe Act of 2015. Regional support for territories continues through contracts with project territories organized in PETR or « pays » in almost half of the metropolitan areas. But since 2016, regions have chosen the scale of communities of municipalities and agglomeration, or even « pays » if this corresponds to a local will to contract. Another region favours to wider spaces than « pays » or communities as a gateway and three regions are more in a box office logic. In addition, one region has abandoned support for local engineering, while another is developing its relationship with territories on this basis. We are keen to analyse these developments for the regions of metropolitan France. The issue in the future will be to determine the right critical mesh of intervention. Support sustainability for the engineering of territories is also a matter of question.