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Stemming disposable culture tide
(China Daily)
Updated: 2005-05-03 07:08
PARIS: Drive into most middle-sized French towns and the scenery is today
much the same. First, in the middle of nowhere, come large out-of-town stores
and hypermarkets.
Next there are new apartment blocks or houses. Then come smaller businesses -
computer shops, MoT test centres, budget hotels and chain restaurants.
Next, you drive into the slightly run-down outskirts of the town's 19th
century expansion. And finally, maybe half an hour or more from the first
Bricorama, or Carrefour, is a beautiful, carefully-preserved town centre.
New government figures show that half a million Britons, among countless
others, have fallen for the charm and the calm of la France profonde to the
extent of buying a home here. But anyone thinking of doing the same should
beware. The nature of the French countryside is changing and every year, there
is less and less of it.
The environment minister, Serge Lepeltier, presented a report by the National
Environmental Institute earlier this month. The report suggested that the green
fields and rolling hills of rural France were being eaten into at an alarming
rate as towns creep relentlessly outwards.
"Urban landscapes have advanced significantly and farmland has regressed,"
the study says. "The urban framework... is growing everywhere. Of the 59 per
cent of France's territory occupied by agricultural land, 4.8 per cent has been
claimed by urban creep in the past decade."
The report, part of a pan-European land use project known as Corine, using
aerial photography to assess major changes in the landscape, says transport
infrastructure - roads, railway lines, airports - has expanded even faster, by
12 per cent over the past 10 years.
And Corine almost certainly underestimates the extent of the phenomenon,
since a change must affect at least five hectares (12.5 acres) before it is
registered. Isolated houses, electricity pylons, mobile phone masts and the
other paraphernalia of urban sprawl do not count.
"Enormous changes are underway," Anne Kriegel, a landscape architect, told
the newspaper Le Monde recently. "Some 60,000 hectares of agricultural land are
disappearing every year, 20,000 of them in the greater Paris region, to be
replaced by urban zones. A whole environment is disappearing."
The change is alarming because the countryside is a vital factor in France's
economy, Kriegel said. "It isn't just a matter of it being about pleasant walks
and the poetry of clouds. The countryside is France's biggest public business.
It's a national asset that, through tourism, brings in twice as much as
agriculture, three times as much as the automotive industry, 10 times more than
the luxury goods trade. And who gives a damn? No one."
Urban creep is not confined to France. But it is more noticeable here because
of a recent, almost exclusively French phenomenon - urban-rural drift. Last
year, for the first time since the World War II, the French countryside stopped
losing population to the cities.
The fate of countless villages - an ageing population, young people fleeing
at the first opportunity, shops and services shutting one by one as their owners
retire or go bankrupt - is gradually being reversed. In 1999, the last year for
which figures are available, the countryside gained 410,000 inhabitants.
The newcomers are not just office workers who, thanks to France's 35-hour
working week and the Internet, can spend several days a week in their holiday
homes.
Nor are they commuters. Nearly half of the "neo-rurals" find jobs where they
move to or in the nearest town. Many start businesses.
The phenomenon crosses class and job boundaries. From 1990-1999, 312,800
elderly people left cities, along with 167,000 managers and independent
professionals, 440,000 white-collar and 407,000 blue- collar workers.
The Interior Ministry says a total of 2.2 million people have moved to the
countryside in a decade. The vast majority does not, however, settle in the
deepest, remotest areas. They opt for small towns and villages within easy reach
- say, 50 kilometres - of a major urban centre.
The most visible evidence of urban creep has been around Paris, Lille, Lyon,
Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Marseille and Nice, in western Brittany around
Rennes and Nantes, in the Rhone valley and along the entire Mediterranean coast.
"It's about achieving a social equilibrium," Kriegel said. "Beautiful
landscapes and an agreeable living environment help foster a sense of
well-being. When a space is badly organized, it generates aggression.
"We need to change our mindset, to repair, organize and transform each place
sensitively. It's the only way to avoid the banality of the `everything is
disposable' culture."
(China Daily 05/03/2005 page6)
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