Le tiers-lieu : un nouvel avatar du développement territorial ?. Le cas de la Wallonie et du hub Creative Valley

The emergence of Third Places is a rapid and recent phenomenon although the concept was born in the United States more than thirty years ago. It is part of a long historical process of appearance of localized production systems either of Italian inspiration (Industrial districts) or of American inspiration (with the model of clusters). These structures, born in the 1970s and 1980s, constitute a first territorial turning point. The emergence of Third Places in large numbers, carries strong stakes and follows the cumulation of several factors with a global dimension (acceleration of the climate crisis, financial crisis of 2008, health crisis since 2019). These events inaugurate, after a period of deepening globalisation, a second territorial turning point. The first turning point was dominated by the "industrial district" or "local productive system" form, the second one seems to be inaugurated around a similar but not identical form of systemic integration, production and consumption, of the "Third Places" type, which appears as the most recent “avatar” of territorial development. The article shows that the Walloon industry, very dependent on the declining Fordist model, has not really taken the first but with the realization of the framework program « Creative Wallonia » program is now engaged in this second environmental and societal turning point.