Territory matters. Production and space in Europe

Abstract

Rather than becoming entangled in the dreadful European crisis, contemporary forms of production could redefine the role of territory. The hypothesis discussed in this paper is that an acute gaze at contemporary spaces of production could describe the territories of a different Europe. The paper is divided into three parts. The first, entitled The "grain du monde" metamorphosis, borrows a statement by Boltanski. It aims to emphasize the necessity of focusing our gaze and opening up new research trajectories. The second, entitled Territories and production, presses for an understanding of the relation between production and space in Europe today, apart from the amusing little stories about recycling and crafts. In this part we refer to nine situations we consider emblematic. The last part puts forward a hypothesis aiming to organize new research trajectories. We point out that the various crises that have hit European territories have emphasized the urban outline of production territories. A point of view to confirm which could contribute to making a more cogent, clearer strategy for cities in Europe. The "grain du monde" metamorphosis European territories seem much more complicated today than in the past due to the economic, demographic, ecological, social and institutional crisis of the last twenty years. A recent research project that analyzed some thirty places in Europe helps us express this assertion better (Bianchetti et al. 2015).The complex processes of redefinition of economies, the change in demographic structure and needs, and immigration act in different ways but converge in their effects on the European territories. While deeply fracturing welfare and asset redistribution policies they produce a fine-grained crumbly territory scarred by many factors not easy to organize. A territory where predicting the needs, wishes and claims of an increasingly uneven population is more and more complicated. Where reduction and growth processes, the complication and centralization of assets, populations, values, rules and rights all combine. In a way, crisis territories are denser, not less dense than before.Firstly, this density is given by new types of precariousness, exclusion and erosion. A large part of what, in a long-term process, was deposited on the soil building up fixed-capital has now been consumed, as in any gradual process of physical decay. This is the case of solid spaces such as infrastructures and industrial platforms but also those of the welfare system and social housing. Their strength used to lie not just in their high-quality design but above all in the identity and strength of the social groups they were designed for. The same groups that today seem fragile, suspended and deprived. A provocative, reactionary thinker like Finkielkraut would describe such a remarkable movement of erosion, subsidence and cracking with the expression "consuming the world". The crisis has actually accelerated the consumption of the world, leaving fragments of heritage of which we are unable to thoroughly...

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