Since the mid-2010s, the state has spotlighted the issue of planning actions in rural spaces by deploying various incentives covering rural communes and small towns in the countryside such as the Atelier des Territoires, the Appel à Manifestation d’Intérêt Centres-bourgs (in 2014), the “Petites Villes de demain” programme (2020), and the “Villages d’avenir” programme (2023). Such schemes share the premise that these territories lack planning and development expertise, and seek to remedy this by providing financial and technical support, as well as by encouraging professionals and researchers to take an interest. This premise is reinforced by the fact that for many years standard planning instruments did not apply to rural communes, which were subject to national regulations.

With the advent of an urban society, contemporary society’s contradictions occasioned by environmental, demographic, economic, and social upheaval now confront rural territories too. Certain of these effects are specific to rural spaces (Jousseaume, 2020), leading to differences between “struggling productive countryside”, “ageing countryside undergoing population loss”, “countryside around towns”, and “tourist and residential countryside” (Talandier, 2008) (Hilal et al., 2011). Others face territorial issues similar to those affecting towns, though rural specificities call for different frameworks of interpretation. For example, depopulation in rural areas in central, northern, and eastern France resembles a process of urban de-growth (Cauchi-Duval et al., 2016). These dynamics also contain contradictions. The demographic revival in southern and western France has been accompanied by increased ageing (Dedeire et al., 2011). Rural towns and villages are affected by vacancy and the deterioration of property in their centres, while large quantities of land are consumed on their outskirts (Charmes, 2013; Melot et al., 2018). The withdrawal of the state imperils the continued survival of service activities (Chouraqui, 2020) even though they significantly enhance attractiveness (Talandier, 2013). Very low density and the increasing economic costs associated with car ownership mean that mobility issues are increasingly important (Motte-Baumvol, 2007; Desjardins, 2008).

Against the backdrop of these many changes, this special issue provides an initial overview of rural planning and development practices, considered here as an activity seeking to transform the built environment and how outside space is managed in rural areas. (Boutet, 2004). While certain authors call for rural planning to be defined in opposition to urban planning practices (Jousseaume, 2016; Boutet, 2004), this issue analyses how planners in rural spaces may reinvent existing measures, thereby contributing to the renewal of urban planning and furthering our understanding of the specificities of rural territorial dynamics.

The six articles in this issue all focus, to varying degrees, on the specificities and methods for intervening in areas described as rural. The first article, by Annabelle Morel-Brochet, Emmanuel Bioteau, Alexandra Le Provost, and Martine Long, looks at how institutions may be reconfigured when a new commune is created. They show how fusing communes together by transferring a set of outlying villages to a small town may generate tensions between policies, projects, and inhabitants’ stances towards this process. Given the village-based organisation of services, policies, and practices, inhabitants and councillors wonder how best to come together within a new administrative space. The second article, by Elsa Vivant, concerns ways of assembling a territorial project, analysing the case of a rural area in central France where planning and development professionals are exploring new approaches, both to shift negative perceptions of a rural area and to involve local actors in a development dynamic. Based on analysis of productions (a model, map, and film) treated as intermediary objects (Vinck, 2009), Vivant shows the importance of cooperation when taking up new working methods. This process, based on the collective production of fiction films, raises questions about how professionals relate to the territory and what they expect of a territorial project. The third article, by Joël Idt, Camille Le Bivic, and Antoine Pauchon, documents the urbanisation process in rural spaces marked by demographic growth and high levels of land consumption. They emphasise the pertinence of generic planning tools despite the specificity of the rural context and the difficulties institutional fragmentation causes for managing and addressing growth-related problems. Although individually the stakeholders do not have sufficient financial, institutional, and technical capacity to act, the authors find they may build up strong cooperation between organisations on various territorial scales. The fourth article, by Yoan Miot and Sarah Dubeaux, studies a scheme conducted by a regional nature park to revitalise village centres. Focusing on the scale of a specific project (whereas the literature on rural development tends to focus on planning approaches), the article confirms documented cases concerning the singularities affecting rural planning, such as the dearth of expertise and financing, and close relations between councillors and inhabitants. The article goes beyond these observations, showing how the activity of urban planning and development professionals is altered, occasioning a rural form of project management that differs from that in towns, given the singular stakeholder systems and methods for drafting and implementing projects in rural areas. The fifth article, by Séverine Bonnin-Oliveira and Emeline Hatt, analyses the institutionalisation of citizen involvement in a project to revitalise a rural commune. They document how a profusion of diverse inhabitant initiatives sprang up after an Écoquartier was established in a town centre. Yet these initiatives lack solidity, be it in the form they take, in their capacity to last over time, or in councillors’ and municipal institutions’ increasing difficulties in coordinating and supporting them. The authors emphasise how citizen involvement in local policies necessitates a transformation in citizen/counsellor relations. The final article, by Véronique Venturini and Caroline Tafani, puts forward a methodology for identifying potential plots for development in already urbanised territories. Given the weakness of territorial planning in the confined rural space of Corsica, they propose tools for identifying non-urbanised spaces in urban patches, potentially paving the way to reduced land consumption.

Above and beyond questions of method, these articles all show that although the concept “rural” covers various types of area, analysing urban planning and development via this particular prism brings singular practices and activities to light. The rural areas studied in this issue seem to fall into two distinct groups: on the one hand, rural areas with small centres where issues of revitalisation predominate, and on the other, communes affected by urbanism that need to manage growth and land consumption. Yet despite this diversity, common points emerge in their urban planning and development practices. First, stakeholder systems, characterised by their weakness and dispersal of powers, are necessarily rooted in building up cooperation. Such cooperation may involve relatively little studied stakeholders involved in processes to transform space, such as a regional nature park, a Pays (a French territorial development body), a planning agency, a departmental territorial engineering agency, and so on. For instance, about 40% of regional nature parks are active in the field of urban development (planning and operational actions, together with experiments in densification, combating sprawl, revitalising small towns, and mobility (FPNR, 2014)). Equally, architecture, urban planning, and environment consultancies have long been actively involved in rural development in many départements. It is noteworthy that these initiatives and reflections about urban development in rural areas are overseen by specific stakeholders who play a more marginal role in urban spaces.

Second, given the closeness between inhabitants and councillors in rural areas, urban planning and development professionals may focus on methods for involving local stakeholders in the processes of a project. Once again, case studies show councillors and technicians may solicit ad hoc expert reports, and devise methods for responding to this challenge. Lastly, the articles in this issue show that stakeholders in charge of transforming and managing rural spaces—with or despite the generic planning tools at their disposal—manage to put together projects and actions responding to various issues, demonstrating the plasticity of urban planning’s legal, technical, and economic frameworks, despite calls for specific instruments for rural spaces.