The UNERGY project aims to jointly explore public policy related to energy, household practices and protests in this field. It contributes to the development of recent work on the relations between those who are governed and the state and policy-feedbacks by paying attention to the way in which public policies are appropriated, not used or contested by the governed. The context of the 'energy crisis' invites us to explore how this crisis is translated into public policies and how the recipients of these policies modify, or do not, their practices in order to cope with rising prices, to respond to injunctions to sobriety or to benefit from certain incentives put in place by the state. UNERGY explores the development of energy policies that aim to help, encourage and discipline those who are governed; the practices of households to cope with rising energy prices, with a focus on inequalities in the access and use of the state aids or reliance on private market tools between different social groups; and, finally, the individual and collective contestation of how the state manages the ‘crisis’. This project is based on the comparison of different territories and on qualitative and quantitative methods in order to measure and explain territorial (rural/urban) and social (in the broad sense of class, gender and race relations) inequalities in relation to public action.

The trade-off/synergy dilemma between economic development and ecosystem services is one of the major issues of sustainable rural development. The main research objective of TRUSTEE is to disentangle the complex relationships between economic development and ecosystem services at different spatial scales and on a large European gradient of rural and rural/urban areas. The project implements an interdisciplinary approach bringing together economists, geographers, agronomists, and ecologists. Sub-objectives are: (i) analyse the multi-scaled determinants of economic development and ecosystem services; (ii) increase our understanding of how to achieve mutual benefits for economic development in rural areas and ecosystem services; (iii) identify and assess the governance mechanisms and policy instruments that enhance sustainable rural vitality; (iv) produce synergies among international researchers of varied disciplines and between researchers and various stakeholders at different governance scales. The work plan relies on seven work packages that involve a cross-cutting strategy linking analyses at various scales (Pan European, gradient of EU countries, local case studies). TRUSTEE will provide a first quantification of the many–to-many relationship between ecosystem services and economic development. It will also produce (i) a large scale inventory of the socioeconomic and policy drivers of ecosystem service sets (ii) a large scale assessment of unlocking ecosystem service potential for rural economic development and (iii) a first internalization of ecosystem services in models of economic development. TRUSTEE will also produce analytical tools incorporating scenarios and policy instruments for the assessment of ecosystem services and their impact on rural development. Last, TRUSTEE will build capacity for interaction between a broad range of academics, experts, stakeholders and policy makers.

Our project currently brings together multidisciplinary teams (mainly sociology, economy, demography and anthropology) from INRAE, INED, the universities of Porto and Barcelona, and a non-European partner, the university of San Martin in Buenos Aires. In response to the call for proposals focusing on the lasting effects of covid on the structure of employment, perceptions, images and social compositions of the countryside, we wish to extend this network around a research program unified by the main idea of overcoming the dichotomies of objects between urban and rural, in the sense that there is no longer any need for a differentiated conceptual and methodological approach, even if the distinction remains very present in common sense. The movement accelerated by covid between town and country underlines the extent to which these spaces are simply used differently, with the urban bourgeoisie able to live elsewhere than in its urban quarters. The covid crisis has underlined the extent to which these places are articulated by productive, recreational and social specializations, and by distinct but interdependent temporalities, generally conceived on macro-scales by public policies and commercial and productive logics. Depending on the location, these macro-impulses produce singular social morphologies and configurations of economic activity, varying over time and within both urban and rural areas. Analyzing space and the social through circulations is therefore an epistemological breakthrough, particularly in sociology and geography, since through circulations, we will import and test in the analysis of rural spaces, a set of concepts from urban sociology - first and foremost those linked to the study of spatial segregation - and from the analysis of markets insofar as they are spatialized. We will also be forging new concepts, in particular for thinking about the circulation of people, but also of objects, jobs, residential systems and relational forms between social classes. The hypothesis is that Covid has made long-term European spatial mutations more visible, accelerating them and generating the conflictuality that these transformations engender. Today, these mutations superimpose two geographical orders: the first refers to a structuring of space based on density and urban-rural hierarchization; the second produces a new organization of space now based on segregated residential and work circulations, hierarchizing and socially articulating the entire territory according to socially differentiated circuits. In many parts of Europe, companies and social groups that are products of the local social space are now juxtaposed with social groups or companies that import their economic and cultural capital from other places. Differences in territorial productivity generate asymmetrical accumulations of capital. Their circulation provokes particularly unequal social confrontations. This main idea of the recomposition of Europe's social geography highlighted by COVID will be broken down into several themes: the first (T1) will focus on spatialized representations of social stratification; theme 2 will deal with the multilocalization of trajectories and social positions (T2); the third theme will focus on jobs in rural areas, from the agricultural, industrial and presential economies to the digital economy (T3) ; a fourth theme will look at the value of territories as captured by the study of real estate markets (T4); theme 5 will look at the geography of the state and the politicization of social groups in rural areas (T5); finally, theme 6 will look at the idea of emptiness and its corollary, social utopia in rural areas (T6).

This project aims at investigating how environmental conditions are intrinsically incorporated in the interplay among land uses in urban regions as a two-ways relationship. We argue that the literature is inconclusive on the adequate shape of environmentally friendly cities because the urban internal structure of city is overlooked. We first shed light on environmental attributes across the urban system to identify similar and divergent trends linked to the urban structure. Then, we provide analysis of environmental trade-offs on a sample of urban regions. This proposal is innovative in three respects (i) the knowledge it will provide by linking the internal structure of cities to the heterogeneity in behaviors and to the feedback effect between land uses and urban structure; (ii) the confrontation of cutting edge econometrics and scaling laws viewpoints on cities coming respectively from economics and geography/statistical physics and (iii) the policy recommendations.

This project is thought of as an empirical and conceptual brick to better understand the infra-national spatialization of the social structure. Our team made up of sociologists, geographers, demographers and economists, using statistical and ethnographic methods, proposes to study the multilocalization of social positions. This must be understood both synchronically, for all people whose movements in the domestic, family, professional or even leisure contexts, are part of various spatial contexts; but also diachronically, through biographies and social experiences sedimented over time, producing multi-sited socializations. In particular, we discuss the trend, still dominant today, to locate individuals or social groups through the prism of a single place at a given time – the address of the main residence on the survey’s date. Our project thus seeks to assess the role played by the multiple and differentiated spatial inclusion of individuals and social groups. This program offers a more dynamic, biographical vision of the effects of place and social stratification, since, if followed, the same person aggregates various spatial and social experiences that can coexist, in the same place, or in different places. We set ourselves four objectives. The first will be to propose a new social geography of France not based on the rural-urban gradient but on the social morphology of space, distinguishing territories according to their socio-professional composition in particular. We hope to identify sociologically close territories beyond their classification according to the rural-urban gradient. The second will be to specify the circulations of different social groups. We expect to identify circuits in space linking socially homologous rural and urban points. We will also be interested in individual circulations which, by their heterogeneity, stand out from these collective circuits. The third objective will lead us to grasp the effects on the socialization and social positioning of these individual movements on the members of the different social groups involved. To do this, we will introduce the notion of space of circulation accumulating in a way all the social positions held in different places of a person. It is assumed that these experiences generally combine homologous social positions but that they can all add up to be diversified. Finally, the last objective, we will try to grasp the effects of these mobilities on localized relations in the places where social groups with diverse social experiences meet, describing social conflicts but also social relations in terms of class alliance.