Sociologist Alice Canabate identifies three major scenarios. The “collapse” scenario—fatalistic, even apocalyptic—is based on the assumption of an imminent “systemic collapse.” The depletion of fossil fuels, resource shortages, and rising inequality would undermine all of our civilizational systems. In this scenario, some do not hesitate to call for the immediate dismantling of major cities. Large cities, which were previously thought of as the cradles of civilization, are now considered “barbaric” infrastructures responsible for the collapse of life and our natural ecosystems.
A second, technocentric scenario calls for reinforcing our dominant systems by accelerating technical solutions capable of supporting green economic growth. This is, of course, the dominant scenario, set against the backdrop of a magnificent strategy of denial. In this scenario, we remain fascinated by massive projects that celebrate technical progress and create the illusion that we still control our future. Think of “smart city” projects, such as the Masdar City project in the United Arab Emirates, which aims to create an eco-friendly city… right in the middle of the desert.
The third, more cautious scenario is gradually gaining momentum. This societal scenario relies on our capacity for collective action, resilience, and creativity. Faced with public institutions overwhelmed by the scale of the crises, environmental, scientific, and cultural movements are calling for a “great transition” and a radical transformation of our sociotechnical and political systems.
In this third scenario, our elected officials and policymakers are under significant pressure to develop public policies capable of drastically limiting land conversion, the destruction of biodiversity, and the use of natural resources and fossil fuels. One current example involves the “zero net land conversion” (ZAN) targets, established by the 2021 Climate and Resilience Act. This law aims to combat urban sprawl, as land development has harmful consequences for natural ecosystems, climate change, and air and water quality.
But implementing the ZAN objectives has proven to be particularly complex. Some elected officials are vehemently opposed to this law, arguing that it is essentially being imposed by Parisian elites and technocrats on elected officials in rural areas. Its critics call it a “ruralicide” law that would prevent any possibility of future development in low-density areas.
This gets to the heart of the matter! The heart of the matter is obviously not just a few strategies and political stances; the heart of the matter is that the ZAN goals—and the public policies that will need to be implemented in line with these transitions—will challenge our perceptions, our beliefs, our practices, our ways of life, our myths, our traditions, our values, and the ways we live.
What the ZAN tells us is that we must transform our planning paradigms—which for over a century have been based on competitiveness, attractiveness, the vertical structure of our institutions, urban concentration, continuous expansion, and the boundless exploitation of natural resources and living organisms.
What the ZAN tells us is that it is high time we took to heart what the poet Paul Valéry said nearly a century ago: “The age of the finite world is beginning.”
What the ZAN tells us is that transitions are much less a technical, technological, or regulatory issue than a cultural one!
That is the central thesis of my book Toward a Culture of Transitions. Territorial transitions have a distinctly cultural dimension. To put it another way, and to borrow the title of the most recent national meetings of urban planning agencies: “NO CULTURES, NO FUTURES! There can be no ecological reorientation without a cultural restructuring of territories.”
We will not transform our regions to address the challenges of these transitions:
Transitions cannot be conceived or implemented without reflecting on the cultural transformations they bring about in terms of lifestyles, values, perceptions, emotions, and the imagination. It is therefore high time to develop a culture of transitions!
In this process, there is no doubt that the arts and culture have a role to play. For scientific knowledge and IPCC reports —which tirelessly describe the collapse of the world—have not had the expected impact on radical political decision-making. Decisions commensurate with the vulnerability of our regions: energy and food dependence, heat waves and heat islands, pollution spikes, overdevelopment, and the destruction of biodiversity, among others. It is therefore not certain that increasing the volume of knowledge produced automatically enhances the capacity of institutions and individuals to act and transform themselves.
In light of this situation, collectives of artists, researchers, urban planners, architects, nonprofit leaders, and intellectuals—as well as the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion, the Urban Planning, Construction, and Architecture Plan (PUCA), and government agencies such as ADEME (the French Environment and Energy Management Agency) and ANCT (the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion) are becoming aware of the limitations of academic, technocentric, or regulatory approaches to transitions and are turning to the arts and culture.
We are currently witnessing a kind of convergence of struggles and ideas that seek to explore the connections between art, culture, territories, and transitions. Cultural approaches to transitions are gradually taking shape. They are driven by a diverse range of actors: artist collectives, collectives of architects and urban planners, and cultural cooperatives such as POLAU (Pôle Arts & Urbanisme), the cultural urban planning cooperative CUESTA, the National Agency for Urban Psychoanalysis, the Bureau des Guides, and the Cabanon Vertical…But also by digital arts and science culture centers, collaborative creative residencies, cultural brownfields, intermediate spaces, and other “third places” for culture.
These diverse approaches contribute to the creation of exhibitions, shows, conferences, and artistic performances that draw on ecological art. But they also make it possible to create experiences that advocate for the legal personhood of rivers, to establish local enterprises rooted in social and environmental issues, to design cultural projects focused on regional transitions, and to develop citizen-led or collaborative research labs. Some approaches even go so far as to attempt to“put cities and regions on the couch, [in order to] identify urban neuroses and propose appropriate therapeutic solutions.”
Although these approaches are diverse, they are united by a broad vision of the concept of culture. These artistic and cultural practices are not limited to the fine arts, academic works, or artistic disciplines. They champion an “anthropological view of culture” and a “living culture” capable of engaging in ongoing exchanges with the knowledge, values, skills, and everyday cultural phenomena of “ordinary” individuals.
By placing the arts and culture at the heart of societal transformations, they help generate a whole range of resources that will prove decisive in setting in motion a dynamic of territorial transition. They promote citizen empowerment, community development, the transformation of mindsets and ways of doing things, the creation of new territorial narratives, and hybrid, locally rooted projects situated at the intersection of social, economic, environmental, and cultural issues. These approaches challenge the usual practices of our public institutions by introducing them to more cooperative modes of design and management that are more responsive to citizen contributions and the latent resources of local areas.
However, beyond their role as institutional disruptors, cultural approaches to transitions face difficulties in spreading beyond the spatial, temporal, and sectoral framework of these experiments. They struggle to influence major regional projects (PLUI (Local Urban Planning Plan), SCoT (Territorial Coherence Plan), PCAET (Regional Climate-Air-Energy Plan), PAT (Territorial Food Project), SRDEII (Regional Plan for Economic Development, Innovation, and Internationalization), etc.), and to create a new system of norms and values at the heart of the dominant frameworks governing territorial public action. While these initiatives alone cannot encompass all of the territories’ transition goals, they nevertheless reveal the limitations of a “governance through experimentation” model . This model often results in isolated, precarious, and short-lived initiatives that, when taken together, struggle to build large-scale, integrated, and sustainable territorial projects.
We therefore believe it is urgent to create a new category of public policy capable of supporting, structuring, legitimizing, sustaining, and ultimately institutionalizing these cultural approaches to transitions. A new field of cultural policy, dedicated to the role that public institutions and their partners wish cultural and artistic practices to play in supporting the transition of regions and the transformation of their public policies.
In any case, this cultural policy for territorial transitions must be framed within a national, interministerial, and territorially focused public cultural initiative. It must enjoy broad political support. It is urgent that elected officials fully embrace these transitions and learn to rebuild "policy on crops". But citizens, too, must prepare to get involved in politics again. For a cultural policy on territorial transitions must be conceived democratically and from the perspective of “a culture of everyone, by everyone, and for everyone”. Finally, this new category of public policy will need to draw on the power of the imagination and its ability to (re)shape the world. “Only she can evoke what does not yet exist in order to bring it into being, just as she gives the violinist a sense of the future by allowing the note he is about to play to take hold of his hand.”.
Raphaël Besson is the author of Toward a Culture of Transitions published by LUCAS.
