Founding territorial sciences Pierre Beckouche, Claude Grasland, France Gu´erin-Pace, Jean-Yves Moisseron To cite this version: Pierre Beckouche, Claude Grasland, France Gu´erin-Pace, Jean-Yves Moisseron. Founding ter- ritorial sciences. 2016. <hal-01356016> HAL Id: hal-01356016 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01356016 Submitted on 30 Aug 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destin´eeau d´ep^otet `ala diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publi´esou non, lished or not. The documents may come from ´emanant des ´etablissements d'enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche fran¸caisou ´etrangers,des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou priv´es. Founding territorial sciences Editors Pierre Beckouche, Claude Grasland, France Guérin-Pace, Jean-Yves Moisseron © Collège international des sciences du territoires (CIST), avril 2016 Photo couverture : Hugues Pecout, Survol des lignes de Nasca au Pérou, 2011 Version française : Fonder les sciences du territoire, Karthala, 2012 Founding territorial sciences Editors Pierre Beckouche, Claude Grasland, France Guérin-Pace, Jean-Yves Moisseron www.gis-cist.fr INTRODUCTION Territorial sciences: Why a book on territories, and why a collection of essays? From having been a fashionable trend in various guises, the question of territory has become a major focus of research in recent years. The premise of this book is that it is impossible to address many of the major challenges facing contemporary societies without taking into account their territorial dimensions. These include climate and energy change, population ageing and health care provision, widening social inequalities and increasing access to basic services, urbanization and urban-rural relations, the mobility revolution, decentralization and local development, the obsolescence of the nation-state and European integration, globaliza- tion, and new North-South relations. Yet the question remains: Does the territorial dimension of the changes affecting contem- porary societies justify the need to create a Collège international des sciences du territoire (CIST, the International College of Territorial Sciences) and to lay the foundations of a new discipline by holding an international conference? The purpose of the “Founding Territorial Sciences” conference – a conference aimed at bringing together researchers from many different disciplines – was to address the following question: Are the concept of territory and the territorial dimension of contemporary challenges important enough to warrant the deve- lopment of a new interdisciplinary field, or even a new research field? Or should the aim simply be to harmonize the methods of territorial analysis applied to a wide range of different issues and disciplines (the environment, energy, health, international relations, etc.) based on a view of the territorial sciences as mere “scientific knowledge”? The broad perspective taken in this book encompasses a wide range of disciplines. The assumption is that disciplines that involve the study of space (e.g. geography and geopo- litics, environmental science, spatial planning, urban development and architecture, urban history and urban sociology, urban and regional economics, and the study and practice of development) make a major contribution to our understanding of territories. This new field 1 Founding territorial sciences will also be of interest to researchers in other social sciences, including demography, the sociology of public policy, institutional economics, environmental law and international law, but also the natural sciences (hydrology and geology), the life sciences (biology, agronomy, health, etc.) and engineering science (geomatics, scientific modeling, complex systems). The interdisciplinarity of the territorial sciences will depend on how we define the field – i.e. as a form of scientific knowledge or as an emerging discipline. If we define the territo- rial sciences as scientific knowledge, the assumption will be that the combined resources of a range of disciplines are needed to understand the territoriality, or territorial dimension, of their objects of study. The aim is to focus on the conceptual approach to the term “terri- tory” in order to highlight potential variations or differences between different disciplines, the assumption being that the study of space in different fields needs to be based on similar methods (i.e. criteria for delimiting space, the measurement of interactions, the role of territo- ries in social representations, the degree of consistency between functional and institutional spaces, and the spatial analysis of resource allocation, among other things). In this sense, it may be more accurate to speak of the “science of territories”, or even simply to develop a common methodology, since the assumption is that territories serve to reveal multidiscipli- nary issues involving other disciplines. However, if we take the view that the concept of territory can be the object of an autonomous discipline, i.e. “the science of territory”, the key concepts, principles and methods of the field will need to be defined. Here, the assumption is that researchers with an interest in territorial issues will need to focus on the territory itself rather than broader issues such as the relation- ship between the individual and the collective. To put it another way, researchers will need to view these broader issues as providing an opportunity to improve our understanding of territory as a research object. Based on the hypothetico-deductive method, the resulting laws will serve to highlight general empirical patterns showing how territories function, but will also serve to demonstrate the diversity of territories based on the analysis of deviations from these patterns. The new field will also need to resist the twin temptations of exceptionalism (i.e. all territories are different and no general proposition can be formulated about them) and deter- minism (i.e. a unique principle governs how territories function, regardless of time and place). In any event, it would be absurd to build a science along these lines solely on the basis of the concept of territory and without seeking to combine it, at the very least, with concepts such as space, network and scale. The aim of this book is to examine these questions and to engage in debates focusing on both scientific and practical considerations as part of a new series entitled “Sciences du terri- toires” (territorial sciences), in collaboration with Karthala. This first volume includes some of the papers and debates from the founding conference held by the Collège international des sciences du territoire on 27, 28 and 29 November 2011. Included here are the contributions that focused most directly on the research question presented in this introduction and further developed in the Debate paper1. We have opted to include the Debate paper despite feeling 1 A first version of this text was made available before the 2011 conference and was used as a call for papers. 2 Introduction that it remains incomplete. The debate is ongoing and the Debate paper needs to be seen as a work-in-progress. Part one examines recent developments at an international level, focusing on both traditional debates, such as the debate between the spatial approach and the territorial approach or the place versus space debate, and the relationships between researchers and the actors of territorial development. Recent initiatives in Germany, Quebec, Italy and the United States are examined in order to better understand recent debates in France over the development of a transdisciplinary field centered around the concept of territory. The collection of territorial data and the processing of local and micro-local data is a major focus of research at the CIST. However, as shown in part two, the combination of rich and varied territorial data collected at different levels raises a number of theoretical, methodolo- gical and empirical issues. The relationship between social demand and professional practice is a major focus of the territorial sciences, given the close ties between territories and the actors of territorial transfor- mation. The assumption is that territories are an important meeting point with social demand, and therefore with policy-making and action. Therefore, the task of the territorial sciences is to articulate and address territorial issues and to provide tools to promote public debate and support decision-making, which is precisely the focus of part three. The discussions generated by the conference are only partly reproduced in this volume. The debate continues on a daily basis in the various events held as part of the GIS CIST2 and will be further explored in future publications in the series, of which this volume is the first. 2 Groupement d’intérêt scientifique (GIS): Scientific interest group. 3 DEBATE PAPER Territory as the legible, tangible product of complex processes and as a resource for action Pierre BECKOUCHE, Claude GRASLAND, France GUÉRIN-PACE, Jean-Yves MOISSERON1 1. THE “SPATIAL TURN”, OR THE RISE OF THE CONCEPT OF TERRITORY Since the 1980s, there has been growing interest in the question of territory among social scientists. Let us begin with a brief outline 1of the various meanings of the concept in different social science disciplines