Metropolitics

“Urban Exodus” as an Extension of the Rentier Sector

Aurélie Delage & Max Rousseau & translated by Oliver Waine — 2023-09-15T05:00:00Z

In the French media, the increasingly recurrent topic of urban exodus has been portrayed as one of the consequences the Covid‑19 pandemic. Aurélie Delage and Max Rousseau, however, instead perceive a “relocation of capital” maintained by media discourse.
“There's nothing left to sell.” Heard from the mouths of rural mayors and real estate agents at the end of the summer of 2020, this phrase is taken up like an antiphon as clear proof of the “urban exodus.” If the theme of rural reinvestment

- Debates / exode rural, immobilier, capital, Covid-19, géographie critique

Shrinking to Survive? Demolition and Energy Transition in Small-Town France

Yoan Miot & Max Rousseau & translated by Oliver Waine — 2017-10-18T05:00:00Z

Faced with a process of advanced decline, public and private actors in the town of Vitry-le-François, in eastern France, have developed an original strategy built around the acceptance of their town's demographic decline. This strategy, focused on energy transition, shows that contexts of urban shrinkage can foster the emergence of alternatives to conventional business-redevelopment policies.
---- Series: Shrinking Cities Although urban shrinkage is still generally tackled through

- From the Field / deindustrialization, demolition, medium-sized cities, shrinking cities, urban decline, smart decline, smart shrinkage, Champagne-Ardenne, Grand Est, Vitry-le-François, urban shrinkage, degrowth, shrinkage, energy transition, Champagne, Eastern France

Shrinking Cities

2017-03-27T05:05:00Z

Brexit in the United Kingdom, the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the rise of extreme-right populist parties in France or more recently in Germany: these recent events have the common feature of being widely portrayed as the political consequences of the decline of old industrialized regions in Western countries. The question of the emergence of a “two-tier society”—characterized on the one hand by a tendency to concentrate the hopes of national economic prosperity in large

- Series

Post-industrial cities: towards a new approach

Max Rousseau & translated by Oliver Waine — 2013-09-25T04:55:00Z

While anglophone urban studies have sought to critique the way capitalism has developed, the French social sciences have instead chosen to produce detailed monographs of urban spaces. However, both traditions can be combined to good advantage, as Max Rousseau shows here through a historical analysis of urban policies in (post-)industrial cities.
Translated with the support of the Institut Français Series: Urban Studies in France The Louvre-Lens, Pompidou-Metz, The Cité du Design in

- From the Field / France, governance, urban policy, deindustrialization, United Kingdom, territorial development, Marxism, crisis, Roubaix, Sheffield, monograph, postindustrialism, Nord–Pas-de-Calais, England, Lille, Northern France, Hauts-de-France