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Since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations (2008), sustainability has been a key priority for European governments. While previous studies have investigated the associations between indicators of sustainable development, few have directly considered a multidimensional approach to assess and compare the performance of territories in terms of sustainable development. As such, a comprehensive assessment of territorial sustainable performance is thus still needed. In this paper, the concept of sustainability relies on the construction of six composite indices (environment and natural resources, energy transition, sustainable mobility, economic dynamism, social cohesion and solidarity, and governance and citizenship) with the aim to provide an evaluation framework for empirically comparing the performance of the 77 Norman inter-communities structures (EPCIs). Hypotheses of the paper rely on the fact that sustainable development is consubstantially multidimensional and should be looked at on a spatial level, because it is at this level that solutions can arise. Accordingly, preserving or containing the degradation of the natural biosphere requires considering the multiple dimensions of sustainable development as well as considering local specificities. Each dimension is examined by applying a spatial exploratory analyses and Hierarchical Ascending Classification (HAC) to classify Norman EPCIs providing six different EPCIs profiles of sustainable development. The findings make it possible to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the Norman EPCIs in the implementation of public policies for sustainable development. Better performances in the different indexes capturing regional sustainable development are generally associated to most densely populated EPCIs but for the environment and natural resources. Given that almost 30 % out of the 75 Norman EPCIs (the Peri-Urban class) present a low performance, both in sustainable mobility and energy transition, policy makers should put all their efforts to gradually adopt a new productive system based on new modes of production and consumption.

The present paper tests the hypothesis that dynamic resilience of post-socialist regional metropolises is mainly based on the temporality and on the strategic direction chosen by local actors. Facing the same challenges (globalization and metropolisation), inside of the same socio-political regime (post-socialist, transition country), territories may follow different adaptive paths to the new economy. The study is based on extensive case studies concerning the economic restructuring path of three regional metropolises of Romania – Timișoara, Cluj-Napoca and Iași. The analysis is structured throughout an adapted version of the framework developed by Hamdouch et al. (2012), which spots the content, the openness and the temporality of adaptation strategies used by different local actors in dealing with globalization and transition to market economy. The results demonstrate that even without a strong cohesion among local actors, the synchronisation of their individual strategies as well as their ability to capitalize on the strengths of their respective regions can foster a time effective and sustainable transition to the globalized economy. At the same time, the case studies revealed the particularly important role played by two categories of actors – local government and university – due to their capacity to build wider strategies contributing to overall local development. On the other hand, where a local entrepreneurial and cooperation culture exists (such in the case of Cluj-Napoca), a rather neutral position of the government in the early phase of transition proved to be an appropriate choice, while a more engaged position was able to foster the internationalisation and the attractiveness of the city during the later phases of transition. We conclude that the continuity of a proactive behaviour of different categories of actors is essential for resilience, as the strategies must be constantly adapted to the new challenges and opportunities revealed across the evolutionary path.

The sustainable development paradigm has become the global reference through which development efforts are observed. Thus, the United Nations Statistical Commission stated the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and adopted a set of 232 monitoring indicators to assess the efforts undertaken by each country to achieve these goals. Facing the diversity of models and development trajectories, socio-cultural heritages and territorial realities, studying the way in which countries seize the stakes of sustainability remains a relevant issue. In particular, within the European Union which presents a great regional disparity, our main purpose is to study how development levels modulate investment in the three pillars of sustainable development, namely environmental, social and economic. In a first step, we identify standard trajectories of European dynamics in sustainability through a multidimensional analysis that takes into account the three pillars and the Human Development Index (HDI). Each of the three pillars is built from the SDG indicators referring to it. In this framework, the HDI is a better criterion to assess the development of a country since it synthesizes measures in three key dimensions: life expectancy, education and economic growth. In a second step, we cross identified trajectories with countries' territorial features to assess the importance of European regional disparities and particularly the East-West differentiation regarding the implementation of the principles of sustainable territorial development. Is this differentiation the result of a long process that has shaped the national specificities of sustainability strategies and policies, or is it rather the more recent and persistent imprint of the old Soviet system in the Eastern countries? Would not it be the revealer of a to-be- completed integration within the EU?

This study aims to identify emergent secondary centers within the Lyon and Bordeaux metropolitan areas and measuring their impact on residential real estate values, through the estimate of hedonic gradients. The various scales of the urban polycentrism are explored through the analysis of two types of subcenters: the emergence of secondary centers and the integration of satellite towns. The main subcenters are identified in both metropolitan areas using contiguity, job density and a minimum threshold for the number of jobs. The impact of subcenters on residential real estate values are estimated using semi-parametric hedonic models with three different specifications: a model with the distance to the main center and the nearest subcenter only, a polycentric model with the distance to every subcenters and a model of general accessibility to jobs rather than distance to subcenters. The results highlight the combination of two main trends to explain the recomposition of urban centrality: the effect of accessibility and amenities. The results suggest a “decoupling” between the effect of amenities with immediate proximity to the centers and the effect of accessibility with a wider distance on both metropolitan areas. The main centers of Bordeaux and Lyon systematically induce a gradient with a break in slope that we interpret as the superposition of a gradient of amenity (with a steep slope) reflecting the enhancement of central amenities at immediate proximity to the center and a gradient of accessibility to employment, with a greater distance. This decoupling between gradients of amenities and accessibility can be compared to the usual distinction in environmental economics between a logic of exposure to amenities (which assumes immediate proximity) and a logic of accessibility to amenities.

The current practices of entrepreneurship and wage-earning in rural areas are contributing to the emergence of singular working collective spaces. This socio-economic phenomenon offers challenging and promising prospects. Thus, rural actors have been able to invent ways of doing things together in shared places to break with isolation and solitude and, above all, to innovate in a societal transitional project, under the following dimensions such as: economic, social, governance, local development model. Our research field is located in western France. The result show that the founders of these kind of « third places » must find a balance between an intention that leaves room for the collective and a real life of cooperation in order to co-construct a « true » common project. Concerned with "mobile" workers, those Other Places of Entrepreneurship and Employees (OPEE) contribute to the development of territories hitherto held back in their economic and social development. We think that the main difference between urban coworking space and « our » OPEE is the own target for each space if they are in rural area or littoral one. Indeed, the urban Working Space try to catch rather individual business opportunities than collective goal(s). However, on the other hand, rural OPEE can be considered like local development tools for improving the attractivity of local territories, to experiment a new local development model. Therefore, OPEE can be associated with the “Social and Solidarity Economy”. In others words, under the pandemic crisis of Covid-19 and the generalization of the distance work, we may be facing a new kind of personal development model which responds to personal wishes and new organizational collective challenges: a social innovation in favour of a better collective well-being, with another relationship to time and to space.