Heteronomy as a land issue in long-term planning history: the case of the Landes airial in France in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries

This article examines the long-term transformation of the Landes airial in southwestern France – a rural spatial form shaped by agropastoral practices and later redefined through forestry, heritage, and environmental valorisations. Based on a geohistorical case study of the Compagnie des Landes, it explores how land value regimes have successively imposed external logics onto territory, producing what is conceptualized as heteronomy; the loss of local control over land use and meaning. The airial is approached as a spatial palimpsest, where overlapping layers of infrastructure, patrimony, and ecological capital reflect changing political and economic intentions. Drawing on archival sources, interviews, and fieldwork, the article demonstrates how rural gentrification, over-patrimonialisation, and ecological aesthetics contribute to current forms of exclusion and spatial vulnerability. While heteronomous planning shaped the region over the long term, climate risk now constitutes the most pressing challenge for the future of the airial as a vulnerable natural area.