Contenu du sommaire

From 2004 to 2014, biogas benefited from generous subsidies from the German federal state. As the other renewable energy sources, biogas is considered not only as a tool to implement the energy transition but also a way to support territorial development especially in rural areas. This study explores this issue by focusing and the investors in the biogas facilities. The starting point of the study is the following hypothesis according to which large-scale investors would impede dynamics of territorial development and territorial anchoring of agriculture. On the contrary farms and local energy operators'investment would ease it. Thanks to a field research in four project territories focused on the energetic use of biomass (Bioenergieregion), this paper first shows that the investor's distribution and the significance of industrial and financial investors in the facilities differs from one case study to another. The study assumes that this distribution could be connected with the regional disparities in German agriculture and agro-industrial production system. Large-scale investment prevails in the northern cases studies while farm remain the main – if not only – investors in the southern districts. In this respect, the post-socialist East Germany appears as a strategic region for industrial or financial companies. Secondly, the field research depicts a more nuanced picture of the connection between investors with territorial development and territorial anchoring of agriculture. On one hand, large-scale investment is confirmed as an impediment for such dynamics but, on the other hand, some of their practice (like the construction of local heating networks) could contribute to it. Farms remain the main investors both in the facilities and local heating networks and local energy operators are key stakeholders to implement local projects based on biogas. However, investments of local stakeholders not necessarily lead to territorial development and could go the other way especially when the projects get bigger. Biogas could then lead to an intensification of agricultural practices, capital concentration and local conflicts.

Territorial Poles of Economic Cooperation, TPEC, are local networks producing goods and services. They are organized around one or more companies of the social economy. These poles include actors whose various, even contradictor, spatial logics may compromise the success and the sustainability of cooperation. The analysis shows that the link to space is bearer of values and in this sense it is likely to consolidate the TPEC. The concept of sociospatial shape allows to better grasp and understand this potential ability of the TPEC to territorialize space on economic, geographic, political and ideological plans. Operationalized through 3 case studies, the concept is relevant to reveal the conditions for the TCEP to be able, or not, to co-create and institutionalize original local development models, particularly suited to the vulnerable territories, by relying on the harmonization of a multifaceted and regional territorial identity.

Through the intersection of a generational approach and looking on a real local basis largely setting the conditions for the research, research themes, sociability and true university practice, this article examines the existence of a tradition of geography in Clermont-Ferrand embodied by three professors, Max Derruau (1920-2004), Pierre Estienne (1923-1996) and André Fel (1926-2009). A great producer of textbooks, this triptych of geographers with a classical background left a deep mark on a provincial geography department at a time of university mutations and epistemological rupture.

This article is based on a field survey started in 2014. It aims to examine the way in which local decision-makers and planners rely on the development of the digital economy to revitalise their territories. The cases studied are those of Nevers and Vierzon, two medium-sized towns in central France, which, under the combined effect of the 'withdrawal of the State from the territories', deindustrialisation and urban sprawl, have been experiencing a phenomenon of urban shrinkage since the 1970s, characterised by a fall in the number of inhabitants and the impoverishment of the population. In spite of the structural dimension of these dynamics, this article shows that local elected officials are inscribing their actions in a form of urban entrepreneurialism that makes growth an unsurpassable horizon. Due to the increasing budgetary constraints on local authorities, their external public (the region, the State and Europe) and private partners have a growing influence on the conduct of these policies, which do not always meet locally expressed needs. In this context, digital technology renews old positions rather than helping to bring out new ones.