Territorial Development and Action Research: The Viaduc de Millau.

From the late 1990s, the researchers at the Ecole Normale for rural development, in Clermont-Ferrand, planned an action research project to investigate and support the socio-economic planning made possible by the viaduc de Millau. This spectacular bridge would increase traffic mobility, and could mean significant opportunities through the centre of France, and especially for Millau and its surrounding area. Drawing on the socio-economics of proximity, to develop an idea of collaborative 'territorial engineering', Valérie Angeon, Sylvie Lardon and their colleagues spent a year working in Millau and its environs, developing and putting into practice principles of consultation and intervention. Their theoretical framework has a mobile and historical notion of permanently self-reproducing territoire at its centre, but it was not going to be straightforward to move from theory to practice and mobilize the entire area. Their work was imaginative and bold, but under-resourced and late. Links to the département capital - Rodez - were underdeveloped. Their concept of 'territorial engineering' was, however, enhanced. They demonstrated that social and economic capital would probably flow to Montpellier if the leading socio-economic actors in the South Aveyron followed their instincts, and they showed a set of alternative development trajectories which could mean prevention of the then-existing and recently resumed long-term gradual decline. Their analysis of the three comparator sites in Hungary, Portugal and Greece showed fairly convincingly how optimum outcomes at the spatial heart of socio-economic developments are not always reached. Their analysis represents a significant moment in the sociology of space and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]