Les « communautés de relations au paysage », l'expérience socio-spatiale avec le territoire comme nouveau cadre pour l'analyse des populations rurales

Can we still set farmers against non-farmers, locals against new-migrants in the contemporary rurality ? Proposing the notion of communities of relationships with the landscape as a new framework for the analysis of the rural populations, this article intends to show the contribution of the landscape studies to this debate. This notion suggests to group together people on the basis of their experience with the rural landscape in order to exceed the socio-demographical categories defined a priori. A case study conducted in the intensive agricultural areas of the south of Québec illustrates how it is applied in a qualitative research which brings up to date two typologies based on ideal types. The results shows a productive rural always attentive in this territories but with faces more complicated that their apparent spatial and social homogeneity hint at. Thus, without reducing the differences between groups of rural populations, the notion of community of relationships with the landscape seems to be particularly heuristic in order to offer a more exactly reading of the challenges link to the recomposition of social spaces in the rural.