Farmers' housing: a barrier for setting up farms?

Assuming that the agroecological transformation of French agriculture will only be possible on condition of maintaining a high number of farmers on the land, this contribution tackles an increasingly critical problem for the renewal of agricultural populations: farmers' difficulties in accessing housing.
Nowadays, when people want to take over a farm, they often can't find a place to live, or the ones they do find are too expensive, unsafe, or unsuitable for their needs. On the other hand, they are confronted with a regulatory environment that, due to land use restrictions, considerably limits building rights in agricultural areas. What solutions can be implemented to provide suitable housing for new entrants without further increasing land consumption in rural and peri-urban areas?
In the absence of large-scale public policies on the subject, innovation seems to be happening from the bottom up: in France, local initiatives are emerging to experiment with new forms of agricultural housing that resemble a ‘common’ to be protected from real-estate speculation. How do the principles of agroecology inspire these alternative housing solutions for farmers? How do these local initiatives renew urban planning practices?
This contribution, based on ongoing PhD research, will first provide an overview of these agricultural housing experiments, whose innovative nature may lie in the architectural approach, in the legal devices developed to preserve the agricultural use of these dwellings in the long term, but also in the new or renewed practices of collaboration, self-organisation and collective management implemented by stakeholders to build a 'common'. The presentation will then examine certain societally relevant issues posed by the emergence of these new forms of agricultural housing, relying on examples from recent field investigations. In particular, we will discuss the challenge of cooperation between the often compartmentalised sectors of urban planning and agriculture, the way in which these forms of housing can reconfigure farmers' residential pathways and their attitudes towards property, heritage and succession, and finally certain obstacles, tensions and conflicts encountered in these innovation processes when dealing with the challenge of scaling up.