The farm of the Millers' park: local experimentation of and for a sustainable urban planning

Philippe Woloszyn (1) , Guillaume Faburel (2)

1 ESO - Espaces et Sociétés
2 TRIANGLE - Triangle : action, discours, pensée politique et économique

System viability approach is analysing how a system reacts, resists, changes and evolves in order to enable its own survival with facing a variety of environmental challenges. Moreover, viability constitutes a way to identify sustainable politics and actions through defining operational constraints, in terms of vulnerability and resilience. This last describes individual and social systems property to face a catastrophic change by resisting, adapting or transforming. Nevertheless, systems approaches have been criticised for their inability to identify "bottom-up" processes, mainly refeering to participatory engagement within territorial challenges; This obviouly leads to the following question: is system viability an easy framework to be applied by local communities ? As explaining and identifying distinct environmental conditions and community responses to the sustainability challenge constitutes a complex activity for both scientific researcher and community participants, could viability indicators easily beeing understood by non-academic people ? Therefore, what type of methodological tools should enable participants to collect information to ensure a communitary viable territorial construction ? To provide answers to those questions, we'll present a participatory experimentation situated at Villeneuve le Roi, a 3-hectare pluriactive farm not far from Orly airport, Paris, France. This dynamical-insertion site tries to status this local environment as a communautary project, implying farming and gardening know-how transmission, environmental acknowledgment and cooking-baking practice. With knowing the importance of food as part of our culture and survival, this last game of the "viable meal" should develop a way of working on fundamental environmental resources such as nutrition, well-being and health. Thus, this participatory initiative can be readed through the three main viability dimensions: resisting –with keeping traditions both in terms of cultural practices and environment protecting, adapting – which means here facing a highly different environment, namely in key areas such as food habits or farming techniques, and transforming – by introducing new consumation modes through cooking their own farmed meals and baking their own bread. This pragmatic initiative also enable Meunier Park inhabitants to rebuilt their identity, that means to process individual resilience through collective participation to farm's life. In that way, transmission of knowledge, but also communautary programmes and collective projects constitute the real sustainable added values for community territory, leading to a new conception of democracy and citizenship.

Mots clés: Resilience; viability; community construction; participatory initiative; sustainable planning

Domaines: Environnement et Société; Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie; Science politique

Philippe Woloszyn, Guillaume Faburel. The farm of the Millers' park: local experimentation of and for a sustainable urban planning. XII th Annual International Conference of Territorial Intelligence , Miedes Bianca, Nov 2013, Huelva, Spain. ⟨hal-01545637⟩