Challenges that differ
Cities face individualism, the ravages of screens on health, sedentary lifestyles, an urbanism often ill-suited to the effects of climate disruption, and noise and air pollution.
Villages, for their part, come up against medical deserts, the constant need for attractiveness, the preservation of landscapes and biodiversity, and the integration of new rural residents.
To each its strengths
The city gave birth to great thinkers and to progress. It is a teeming source of ideas and research. Thanks to the city, the stranger has become an enrichment more than a threat, opening its inhabitants to the world.
It adapts quickly to metamorphoses, because it is at the heart of the changes produced by the way of life of its inhabitants. This ferment of minds nonetheless contrasts with the sedentarisation of bodies, often confined in apartments.
Rural life, by contrast, is inscribed in a long timeframe. There, one seeks the balance between body and mind, one protects children from a progress that is sometimes thoughtless. There, one finds the distance needed to adopt innovation differently, without abandoning the salt of the human: conscious contact with nature and with others, far from omnipresent screens.
Progress is born of the way we look at our environment
If we asked a group of country and city dwellers to draw the world as they imagine it — or, better, as they dream it for tomorrow — we would obtain very different visions. Faced with the challenges of our time, this exercise would be precious. Why? Because, far more than adapting, rural life must preserve and regenerate. The city tries to bring biodiversity back; villages work to protect it.
These two approaches, complementary, do not imply the same trajectories. Country dwellers remain in direct contact with natural cycles: they know their land, learn to deal with distances, live to the rhythm of the seasons. Nature there is not an object of consumption, but a living environment. At this scale, relevant solidarities and interconnections are woven: the climate, the soils, the species sometimes vary over a few kilometres, and the responses must be anchored in this local environment.
Rural life is also invited to invent forms of participatory democracy, because national divides also crystallise there. It also knows how to conceive local energy production, in citizen co-ownership. Finally, the economy is conceived differently there: circular economy, low-tech, short supply chains. Of course, much has already been undertaken in rural areas: projects such as the RI2S third place in Castres, which seeks solutions for the autonomy of the elderly, or nearly 90 connected campuses aiming to bring higher education closer to the territories.
Beyond imported solutions, innovations born locally are emerging: Rézo Pouce in Moissac for frugal mobility; La Quincaillerie in Guéret, a third place for assembly; the PTCE Sud-Aquitaine in Tarnos; the “Médicobus” experiment in the Loire. So many experiences born here, then potentially spread elsewhere. However, these local innovations still remain in their infancy; more ambitious undertakings must be opened.
In conclusion
In light of these specificities, rural life can become a laboratory of ideas on various themes such as agriculture, ecology, digital technology, energy, health, construction, school or democracy. Let us imagine campuses dotting our countryside: not copies of urban trends imported by new rural residents, but places designed with and by the inhabitants, in collaboration with researchers from various backgrounds and countries, which will give rise to new initiatives and companies. These campuses would become producers of ideas capable of irrigating future developments and rebalancing the flow of innovation.