Agrégation du bâti résidentiel et mutation des établissements humains dans les campagnes françaises

Abstract

Whereas the demographic renewal of the french countryside, initiated before the 1990s, is confirmed by recent datas, it seemed necessary to analyse in a closer way how it impacted small towns, villages, hamlets, which compose rural and suburban areas. This exploration of the “hidden face” of countryside changes over the past fifty years is based on the notion of granularity that characterizes, in a given space, the distribution of its inhabitants within the different kinds of human settlements. It relies on the comparison of fourteen regional samples representative of the various inherited agrarian structures. Several findings emerge: the diversity of regional granularities that testify to the durability of the population sowing from the “rural substrate”; a widespread population distribution within the different kinds of human settlements, particularly for the benefit of towns and villages. By combining morphological and demographic approaches at the lower levels of urban hierarchy, this works encourages to consider local urban configurations, complementary to the already long-standing one on cities and metropolises.

Keywords

• countryside
• scattered urbanization
• built aggregate
• human settlements
• population distribution
• granularity