From the right to the city to the right to the village? French perspectives on the urban-rural divide

Within urban studies, the planetary extent of energy and material flows is increasingly questioned as a major cause of current ecological crises. Within degrowth movements and thinking, pleas for the relocalisation of humanity’s attachments are becoming common and, in France at least, they are often associated with anti-urban stances and calls to leave big cities and metropolises, considered to be the epicentres of planetary urbanisation and globalisation. This review essay presents this ecological critique that developed in France over the past decade. It starts with a fresh look at the right to the city. To what extent can big cities still embody an ideal at odds with urbanisation, as Henri Lefebvre posited? Does radicalism not lie more in the back-to-the-land calls that are re-flourishing? The essay then discusses the opposition between planetary urbanisation and relocalisation, and explores the recent French conversation on the ‘right to the village’. Beyond such a right, a crucial issue for degrowth, however radical its vision, is to ruralise the urban, particularly in large metropolitan regions.