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This chapter investigates the role of Environmental Citizenship within the twenty-first-century societal issues of human activities - urban development, transport systems, tourism, and cultural heritage. The first part of the chapter analyses the relationship between Environmental Citizenship, urban development, and cultural landscapes. Cities are home to the majority of the world’s population and are responsible for most of the resource consumption and waste production, which places them in the focus of Environmental Citizenship discourses. The issues of urbanisation and Environmental Citizenship are followed by issues of sustainable transport that, among others, have a goal of reducing transport disadvantage of marginalized social groups. Cultural heritage is identified as a new fourth pillar of sustainable development (along with environment, economy and society), and its role in Environmental Citizenship is explored. Sustainable tourism is reviewed using new approaches that have adopted elements of Environmental Citizenship and were introduced as a reaction to unsustainable mass tourism. Finally, the chapter presents certain practices of Environmental Citizenship within the investigated fields of expertise that could be promoted and implemented elsewhere. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

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The question to be addressed here is that of the agglomeration/dispersion forces that are likely to account for the location of people and jobs in rural areas and the way they explain spatial patterns in rural areas depending on urban influence. Economic geography models may provide suitable tools with which to investigate the organization of rural areas. We first review these models, focusing on dispersion forces, which rest basically on land consumption and transport costs. We suggest then a set of hypotheses concerning the main forces at work in rural areas. Intensity of agglomeration economies is hypothesized to be related to the urban size, which in turn induces increasing land rents and finally agglomeration diseconomies. Such diseconomies encourage population spread around the city and in a second stage a possible partial decentralization of population-serving firms, which seek the proximity to the households. The consequences in terms of spatial patterns are that beyond a certain threshold of the city size, decentralization of population-serving firms occurs, giving rise to secondary services centers, whereas services remain concentrated in the center for smallercities. Empirical results concerning population densities, labor force exchanges and distribution of residentiary services in labor-market areas surrounding cities of more than 20,000 inhabitants in six French regions are presented. Quelles sont les forces d'agglomération et de dispersion qui sont susceptibles d'expliquer la localisation des hommes et des activités dans les espaces ruraux ? Comment déterminent-elles les configurations spatiales particulières observées dans ces espaces, qui montrent la prégnance de l'influence urbaine ? Les modèles d'économie géographique peuvent se révéler des outils adéquats pour analyser cette question de l'organisation spatiale des zones rurales. Nous proposons ici une revue de ces modèles, en insistant sur les forces de dispersion, qui reposent essentiellement sur la consommation de sol et les coûts de transport. Nous posons ensuite un ensemble d'hypothèses concernant les principales forces à l'ouvre dans les espaces ruraux. L'intensité des économies d'agglomération est supposée être fonction de la taille de la ville. Cette dernière induit des rentes foncières croissantes et donc des déséconomies d'agglomération. Ces déséconomies provoquent un étalement urbain autour de la ville et, dans un deuxième temps, une décentralisation partielle des services aux ménages, qui suivent l'étalement de la population. En conséquence, au-delà d'un certain seuil de taille de la ville centre d'un bassin d'emploi, la décentralisation des services aux ménages donne naissance à des centres de service secondaires, tandis que les services restent concentrés au pôle dans les plus petits bassins d'emploi. Des résultats empiriques concernant les densités de population, les flux de main-d'ouvre et la répartition des services à la population dans les bassins d'emploi desvilles de plus de 20 000 habitants de six régions françaises sont présentés. Document type: Report

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