Audrey Brantonne

Architecture plays a significant role in contemporary debates on public policy relating to regional planning. It is one of the narrative supports accompanying the revitalisation of rural areas. However, the use of architecture in this context is rarely the subject of critical studies, which would nevertheless reveal its paradoxes and limitations.

Far from being a new issue, the desertification of rural areas was a topic of public debate in France long before the first decentralisation policies were introduced. Concurrent with deindustrialisation, the designation of "metropoles d'équilibre" (balanced metropolises) in 1964 was part of a process of metropolisation, the effects of which we continue to study. Over the last fifteen years, the growing expression of a feeling of relegation in the French countryside has fuelled the creation of dedicated policies. Initially experimental in 2014, public revitalisation efforts entered a phase of massification in 2020 with the launch of the "Petites Villes de Demain" (Small Towns of Tomorrow) programme.
Affected by socio-economic changes, these small towns are sometimes experiencing the impoverishment of their populations and demographic decline. These phenomena find clear spatial expression in the deterioration of public spaces and housing stock, residential and commercial vacancy rates, and the proliferation of brownfield sites. The expression of various symptoms is replaced by the unambiguous use of the term "devitalisation", concealing the diversity of situations and the complexity of the dynamics at work.
In Lorraine, these issues are particularly acute: in addition to the territorial contrasts accentuated by metropolitanisation, there are the scars of deindustrialisation, which still bear their mark on the region. The small towns of Lorraine, through their functions and their histories, concentrate the problems and appear as spaces that demonstrate these divisions.
Revitalisation programmes therefore pursue the objective of a return to growth and attractiveness, and their deployment is based on a narrative in which architecture is presented as a medium. Because of its ability to capture the imagination, the discipline is mobilised in studies that propose revitalisation scenarios through the transformation of the living environment. However, these approaches involve a very modest scale of action, given the global and profound changes they aim to bring about. They encounter obvious obstacles when it comes to implementation. The place and role given to architecture in these approaches thus reveal the inconsistencies of revitalisation policies, whose limitations are more quickly felt in a regional context of decline, such as Lorraine.

Does this mean that architecture is irrelevant to the challenges of devitalisation? While it may not be able to influence socio-economic paradigms and may prove ineffective when mobilised in this way, it can nevertheless shed light on the situation of small towns in decline in many ways. History alone is enough to support the hypothesis of a close intertwining of architecture and politics. In light of the challenges of the 21st century, it seems that this relationship could be re-examined, with the analysis of revitalisation approaches contributing to this process. Far from reducing or essentialising the role of architecture to that of an operational vehicle – sometimes condemned to powerlessness – the aim is to re-examine the role of architecture in public revitalisation initiatives, from their emergence to their evaluation, in the light of the past fifteen years.