Local communities have perfectioned their knowledge about their environments for generations. Considering modern management dynamics and the changing characteristics of their immediate environments, local communities must trust the authorities' management of these risks. However different types of risks expose these communities. This article proposes a comparative analysis of local trust dynamics between a locality in the French coast exposed to flood risks; and a town in inner Italy exposed to earthquake risks. The study focuses on how participants express calculative or relational trust through interviews. Results show that French participants consider the local risks of coastal floods to be minimal. In this sense they trust local authorities with the ability to manage these situations, even if generalised concerns over relational trust are also expressed. In Italy local inhabitants express a high awareness of earthquake risks. But the lack of preventive action from local authorities is associated with the expression of low calculative and relational trust.
KEYWORDStrust; natural risks; Social Representations; coastal floods; earthquakes.
RESUMENLas comunidades locales han perfeccionado el conocimiento sobre su medio a lo largo de generaciones. Teniendo en cuenta las dinámicas de gestión modernas, y las cambiantes características de sus medios inmediatos, las comunidades locales deben tener confianza en la gestión de estos riesgos por parte de las autoridades. Sin embargo, estas comunidades están expuestas a diferentes tipos de riesgo. El presente artículo propone un análisis comparativo de las dinámicas de confianza locales entre una localidad de la costa francesa expuesta a riesgo de inundaciones, y un pueblo en el interior de Italia expuesto a riesgos sísmicos. El estudio se centra en la forma en que los participantes manifiestan confianza calculativa o relacional a lo largo de las entrevistas. Los resultados muestran que los participantes franceses consideran que los riesgos de inundaciones costeras locales son mínimos. En este sentido, confían en la capacidad de las autoridades locales para gestionar estas situaciones, aunque expresan preocupaciones generales sobre la confianza relacional. En Italia, los habitantes locales manifiestan un alto nivel de conciencia sobre los riesgos sísmicos. Pero la falta de acciones preventivas por parte de las autoridades locales se asocia con una baja confianza calculativa y relacional.
As in many other European countries, urbanisation and urban sprawl along the French Mediterranean coast are a major concern. Understanding this phenomenon requires both multi-level and multidisciplinary approaches. In this perspective, this article presents a framework for the observation and analysis of urban sprawl in the French Mediterranean coastal zone. Developed in the context of a scientific coastal observatory with four contrasting study sites, the framework was designed to structure the observation and analysis of urban sprawl dynamics and their driver variables. Although urban expansion is currently slowing in coastal zones, local exceptions can be found and accounted for by historical urban planning and environmental protection measures, local residential tax policies and contradictory perceptions of coastal zones by residents. Our multidisciplinary initiative is capable of integrating different temporal and spatial scales and has proven relevant in analysing urban sprawl in coastal areas. It shows the need to study coastal areas at finer scales to identify specific dynamics in their local contexts, since these represent the scale at which administrative decisions are made.
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