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Brownfields redevelopment is an issue of increasing concern for urban planners and decision-makers, especially in highly industrialized countries. As the multidisciplinary scientific literature on brownfields redevelopment continues to grow - usually targeted at the scale of a single site - the challenge becomes more and more important when it comes to managing the redevelopment at the level of a portfolio of sites. This article presents a novel approach aiming the systematization of an ex-ante economic analysis of brownfield redevelopment at the scale of a large industrial area. We have developed a decision support tool based on constrained optimisation and cost-benefit analysis to identify the economically optimal combination of redevelopment choices for a given portfolio of sites and future use alternatives. This approach incorporates: (1) the costs and benefits of brownfields redevelopment; (2) sites characteristics and compatibility with future-use alternatives; (3) regulatory requirements and regional policy orientations; and (4) synergies or interactions between sites and future-use alternatives. The implementation of the modelling exercise is illustrated with the case study of the Vallée de la Chimie, for which the model enabled to find an economically optimal solution and then to explore different scenarios. Results demonstrate that portfolio scale analysis offers relevant economic information for decision-making. Urban-planning experts from Lyon metropolis who are in charge of the case study signalled that the tool offers relevant support for exploratory studies, especially by using it to compare different scenarios based on different prospective evaluations. Therefore, we argue that there is scope for further development of portfolio-scale decision support tools as a complementary approach for the well-known single-site scale best practices.

Transitional brownfields constitute real laboratories for experimenting new uses of urban space. This article describes the role of researchers to co-construct urban space with inhabitants and local actors. We query this process of co-construction by mobilising an approach of user innovation in economics. Von Hippel research (2002, 2006) is employed, as source of new insights on use co-creation and new related good co-production. Researchers are intermediary figures in accompanying inhabitants. They support the redeployment of transitional uses of brownfields towards new objectives of urban renewal, following the example of the scientist intermediary role in Von Hippel's research (1976). The interest of Von Hippel's research is that it allows us to understand how to take advantage of user's creativity to renew needs by offering them design tools. We conceptualize an analytical framework of co-construction of transitional brownfield spaces according to four steps (activation of new uses ; recombination of existing resources to create these new uses ; uses appropriation ; diffusion of these new uses). We test it on a priority district for urban renewal in the city of Angers. Researchers and students from the Vegetal campus have co-constructed with inhabitants modular in situ facilities. The latter combine knowledge and practices from the plant world and follow the aim of reversibility. The inhabitants are involved in a public participation approach whose participation degree varies according to the different process stages of urban-space co-construction. This hybridization has produced new uses as result of new interactions between campus resources and neighbourhood resources: food supply, recreational and social new uses. The researchers and the students involved accompanied inhabitants in this transition. This one responds to an ecological and climatic challenge they will be able to integrate into their future projects and tasks. This article opens new avenues for research about incremental innovation in the urban environment.

The aim of this article is to analyze the Norwegian inner-city car restriction policy, to identify its motives, understand its operation and measure its efficiency. It is based on a cross-analysis of the Norwegian legislative developments in the beginning of the 1990s on the one hand and the results on the other hand, apprehended through the study of the modal split of the car. It appears that the significant decrease of car use in Norwegian cities is the outcome of a vertical convergence; that is to say a national policy imposed on local governments. This decrease is evidence of the capacity of the national level to adopt a systemic approach on urban mobility, which succeeds in considering the competitive nature of the various transport modes and in implementing strong measures to restrict car traffic. However, the effectiveness of this national car restriction policy varied from one urban space to another, a sign of hybridization with the local policies and contexts, which were more or less receptive to this summons. Finally, this comparative detour allows taking a decentered look at the situation in France where, against a backdrop of juxtaposition and superposition of urban mobility competencies, and in the absence of a strong national injunction, policies in this field have remained bottom-up and sector-specific. The consequence is that, in comparison, car use is greater in French cities than in Norwegian ones while the Nordic country has experienced a late and brutal urban transition, favorable to low urban density and significant car use.

In this article, we investigate the role played by a local currency in the construction of organised proximities between local businesses. By defining the local currency as an intermediation operator, we specify the roles played by this device among the economic actors who join it. The article is based on an analysis of the durability and intensity of business-to-business relationships in local currency and the meaning that actors give to these relationships. The study of quantitative and qualitative data from the case of the eusko in the Basque Country shows that the currency fulfils several intermediation functions that generate norms, values, practices and representations shared by the actors, giving them the feeling of being close. The circulation of money pushes some firms to look for new local partners in order to reuse the local money they receive from their customers. This incentive has contrasting effects depending on the business sector, but the analysis suggests that beyond commercial links, participation in the monetary community produces specific relationships between businesses. Indeed, the use of the local currency generates, over the course of exchanges, specific practices and shared meanings in professional relationships. As a matter of fact, businesses have a variety of uses for the local currency, including business-to-business trade but also solidarity practices. By creating distinctive practices within its users community, the local currency generates organised proximities. The analysis of the uses of the local currency by the entrepreneurs also reveals the centrality of a moral dimension in the construction of these forms of proximity.

This article focuses on new forms of agriculture, a concept that has emerged mainly from the press and that corresponds to innovative or reinvented forms of agriculture such as permaculture, aquaponics, rooftop farming, parking lots or vertical farms. We explore whether the concept constitutes a new agricultural model as defined in the literature. From a theoretical perspective, our study is anchored in the framework of institutional logics. Methodologically, we employ a textometric study using the software program Iramuteq and the press articles as a corpus. We also carry out an analysis of the composition of the corpus in terms of the number of articles published according to date and the profile of the press outlet that publishes them. Our findings show that the press articles contain words associated with four different logics: stakes, territorialization, agronomic concerns, and communication. The analysis of the corpus composition shows that the number of publications about new forms of agriculture has grown recently and especially from an urban perspective. However, articles about the topic from a rural perspective also exist. Our findings, therefore, highlight the divergences among institutional logics and, above all, show the great plasticity of the NFA, whose contours vary according to the press publications and over time. In sum, we show that new forms of agriculture are in fact a cluster of models which are still are evolving. Our article thus contributes to research on the coexistence of agricultural models and underlines the role of the press in the modelling of them.

Analyzing and measuring well-being of citizens is a major issue for public policies. It is now widely accepted that this implies overcoming monetary and economic issues to encompass the multiple dimensions defining well-being: health, education, natural environment, social ties, or participation in civic life for instance. Recently, it has acquired unprecedented importance with regard to the multiplication of the work of Observatories, Statistical Institutes and National and International Organizations. In France, this has resulted in proposals of regional human development indices and territorial indicators of quality of life. This paper contributes to this literature. It uses a statistical approach based on variable clustering for the analysis and measurement of quality of life at the scale of local territories. The features of the ClustOfVar method - in particular the simultaneous construction of clusters of variables and the definition of associated synthetic variables - make it possible to respond to the double challenge of reducing the size of data and revealing the multidimensionality of living conditions. This work uses the dataset compiled by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee) for the analysis of quality of life in France. The results highlight the associations between variables and reveal the empirical components that structure living conditions. The mapping of synthetic variables and the calculations of spatial autocorrelation indices confirm the existence of spatial interactions operating at different scales.