La résilience territoriale comme principe et comme volonté Réflexions à partir de la question de la pollution des sols dans des territoires (dés)industrialisés

Abstract

Since the 2000’s, we have observed an affirmation on the notion of resilience as much for researchers as for practitioners in the fields of urbanization and territories. Relying upon a genealogy of the notion and a history of its mobilization, the present article intends to question the resilience in a critical manner by putting it to the test in a concrete situation : the question of soil pollution in deindustrialized territories in the Saint-Etienne region (France). Long evaded by requalification politics started in the 1980’s, soil pollution became a public problem at the turn of the 1990’s. Its treatment constituted a new challenge for local players confronted by the changing role and double standards of the State. In fact, the latter continually increases its level of control requirements leaving heritage problems that it contributed to create to local authorities, in a non-stabilized legislative and regulatory context, and in permanent contradiction between withdrawal into the norm and the incitement to innovate, which leads to the challenge. Local public action must therefore constantly adapt, gain in technicality to have a little seen result which, at best, falls within the scope of upgrading. The issue therefore seems to be to remove the issue of soil pollution from its confinement in the technical sphere and to put it on the political scene, by therefore slipping injunctions to resilience on a genuine attention to uneven local capacities of action and on a principle of socio-spatial justice at a wider scale.

Keywords

• territory
• resilience
• public policies
• soil pollution
• deindustrialisation
• stigmatisation