Contenu du sommaire : Territoire et numérique

Today's “digital revolution” is making information available in real time and spatial and social interactions much less dependent on physical distance. But is it really creating a revolution in our ways of living, of producing, of building, and of governing territories, or is it fundamentally only leading to a reinforcement of trends which are already well-established, such as the development of remote working, of e-services, of e-commerce (and of the local logistics which is one of the consequences), the multiplication of places dedicated to the emergence of innovation, etc., reinforcement that would go together with a slight renewal of the classical concerns of regional sciences: job-destroying creations, rationalisation of means, inequalities in economic development and in the ability to innovate, etc.?For regional sciences, is the digital revolution really a revolution, so far still at the gestation stage, just for current and future societal and territorial impacts linked to the development of artificial intelligence, and unequally affecting populations and territories? Will AI strengthen or on the contrary lead to upheavals in structures, interactions, and spatial and social practices?Such are the questions examined in this text, which gives a historical perspective to the notion of Digital Territories and the theme Territory(ies) and Digital, title of the 2021 ASRDLF colloquium that was held in Avignon.

The development of so-called sustainable public purchasing in France is part of a long-standing regulatory evolution. The EGALIM, Climate and Resilience, and Anti-Waste and Circular Economy laws have recently transformed what was a possibility for public purchasers into an obligation. They are even sometimes presented as an opportunity to promote local public purchasing. Whether it is the implicit consequence of a more environmentally friendly purchase or the explicit objective of the public purchaser who uses green purchasing as an instrument, local purchasing must be analyzed. After detailing the legislative framework in force in France, this article first presents the theoretical arguments for analyzing the link between local purchasing and sustainable purchasing. In particular, our analysis shows how optimal purchasing procedures, whether they explicitly aim at local purchasing or integrate an ecological dimension, can be confused, making it difficult to discern the intended objective and in turn requiring a more empirical analysis of the practices observed. We then present all the data (both very disparate and incomplete) currently available in France (BOAMP, TED, DECP) on which such analyses can be conducted. We then present some empirical results from these data, pointing out the interdependencies that may exist between green purchasing and local purchasing and underlining the central issue that exists around the open data formats of public procurement, their scope and their exhaustiveness. In particular, our results seem to indicate that we cannot exclude the hypothesis that local purchasing has protectionist foundations and is not necessarily the consequence of an announced environmental concern.

In France, the shrinkage of public services has been aggravated by budgetary austerity policies since 2000. Bank branches have also experienced a decline, linked to changes in customer practices due to the emergence of online banking and economic imperatives. While this shrinkage of public services has been well studied, this is not the case for bank branches or other private services, especially in a comparative logic.Therefore, in this study, we begin by describing the closures of service points in the Sud region of France between 2007 and 2017 for several types of public services (secondary school, gendarmerie post, maternity hospital, post office) and of Crédit Agricole bank branches, taken as an example of a private service. Then we try to understand their logics, examining the role of demography and of the spatial distribution of the services. Finally, the impact of the closures of the different types of services on accessibility has been measured with a geographical information system, to see if the closures in the private and public sectors impact the same territories.The results strongly qualify the claims regarding a 'territorial abandon', demonstrating that the spatial logic of closures differs depending on the services (in particular on whether or not they have mandatory spatial access constraints: here gendarmeries and post offices can be contrasted with schools, maternity hospitals and Crédit Agricole) and the scales (the smallest spatial units are not the ones systematically impacted by closures, especially at the inter-municipal level). The impacts of the closures of the various services on accessibility remain low and do not add up locally.

Climate change leads to an increase in precipitation and temperatures. Due to the use of impervious surfaces, urban areas are experiencing an increase in rainfall runoff and urban heat island phenomena. In France, a national climate change adaptation strategy guides national adaptation objectives that must be translated into plans and programs, including inter-municipal local urban plans (PLUi in French). The PLUi have the capacity to convey levers for adaptation such as limitation of soil sealing or the use of the blue-green infrastructure as a support for stormwater management and urban cooling. However, there is no standard adaptation content for the PLUi and local authorities question about whether their documents effectively convey adaptation. We create a content analysis method, specifically designed for the sustainable development project (PADD), a key element of the PLUi as it contains the political project for the territory, in order to understand its adaptation ambitions. The case study is the Nantes metropolitan area, a territory particularly affected by floods and which recently approved its PLUi. We develop here the first step of the method which consists in a lexicometric analysis applied to the PADD corpus. The results reveal that the terms referring to the environment are the most treated by the document. However, specific themes dealing with climate change, adaptation, stormwater management or thermal comfort are statistically less prevalent. This analysis allowed us to formulate assumptions that we hope to confirm or refute through the application of the other steps of the content analysis method. We show that textual analysis can provide useful information for planners seeking to determine whether the policy direction communicated by their PADD is supportive of adaptation.