This chapter looks to provide a contemporary state of the art discourse on the concept of power and to explore how power connects with media and public education within the contemporary social world.

Discourses on power

Plan de acción para los espacios naturales protegidos del estado español

Protection de la nature

L’ouvrage reunit des textes correspondant a des communications presentees a l’occasion des « Journees d’etudes de geographie » qui s’etaient tenues a Angers en mai 2004. La coherence de l’ouvrage est en grande partie assuree par l’introduction et la conclusion generale, signee par les coordonnateurs du livre ainsi que par la reunion des articles en trois chapitres thematiques. Le premier chapitre, intitule « Touriste et patrimoine : ces passants qui ne font pas que passer... », confronte des ...

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Tourisme et patrimoine. Un moment du monde

When we reflect that the mountain valleys were thickly populated as far east as Yosemite (in summer, still further up), and consider the great extent and fertility of the San Joaquin plains … . then add to this the long and fish-full streams, the Mokelumne, the Stanislaus, the Tuolumne, the Merced, the Chowchilla, and the San Joaquin encircling all, along whose banks the Indians anciently dwelt in multitudes, we shall see what a capacity there was to support a dense population.

The Sierra Nevada

The development of hydroelectricity in the French central Pyrenees at the beginning of the 20 century gave rise to some strong resistance, all in the name of landscape preservation and protection of the tourist resource that it represented. Space had to be shared, and some reserves of picturesque features were obtained from the industrialists, in exchange for a free hand in tourist development. The chapter analyses how the interplay of actors brings about this spatial partition. It shows the ambivalence of the discourse constructed to legitimise it. By looking in depth at the case of the protected site of Gavarnie, it sheds light on the nature of the social issues that were emerging as a background to this resistance to hydroelectricity in the landscape and shows how, through it, the power of an elite as an aesthetic authority, was imposed on communities in the mountain areas. The arrival around 1900 of the energy paradigm of hydroelectric power marked a decisive historical threshold for a great number of mountain massifs in Europe. The development of hydroelectricity first transformed the mountains into an area that welcomed industrial modernity, then, especially after the end of the First World War, into a production area for an energy that could now be transported, and which mainly benefited the low-lying plains. Today this separation of energy production and consumption is almost complete, with the majority of electrometallurgical and electrochemical factories in the high mountain valleys having been dismantled and reconverted. This gives the mountains the status of "energy reserve" (according to the terms used in the 1992 Rio Declaration) which can only be exploited and developed through national and trans-national networks (Blanc and Bonin 2008). The flow of energy between the mountains and the plains which started at the beginning of the 20 century was an extremely powerful vector for assimilating the populations and economies of the mountain areas. This was especially so since at this very time when the mountains were required to satisfy the energy needs of the lowlands and the towns, a new stage was reached in developing the tourist potential of the high massifs, with hydroelectricity creating the conditions for improving the accessibility and attractiveness of the high mountain areas (Bouneau 1997, 2003, Métailié and Rodriguez 2011, Rodriguez 2012). 1 . Traduit du français par Hilary Koziol. 2 This observation and all the analyses that follow are based on the initial results of research entitled "Landscape resources and energy resources in mountains in Southern Europe. History, comparison, experimentation", in the context of the programme Ignis mutat res. Considering architecture, cities and landscapes through the prism of energy, and financed by the Atelier International du Grand Paris. This research covers four mountain regions in Europe: the Sierra Nevada, the Dolomites, the Valais and the Pyrenees.

Ressources paysagères et ressources énergétiques dans les montagnes sud-européennes. Histoire, comparaison, expérimentation

Depuis les années 1980, le concept de médiation fait florès et on assiste à une croissance exponentielle des pratiques de médiation ainsi qu’au recours à des médiateurs. Le domaine du paysage n’a pas été épargné par cet essor à tel point que l’on a vu émerger dès la fin de cette décennie l’idée d’une médiation paysagère. Les premières constructions théoriques et applications pratiques en la matière sont issues de recherches appliquées et d’expérimentations scientifiques essentiellement menées par des agronomes et des géographes. Le propos de cet article est de réaliser une analyse critique du corpus produit par ces chercheurs au cours des décennies 1990 et 2000. Sur cette base, nous chercherons à éclairer dans quel contexte mais aussi sur quels postulats théoriques, épistémologiques et méthodologiques ces recherches pionnières, très souvent en prise avec des questions de développement local dans les espaces ruraux, ont été fondées. Il s’agira donc de décrire et d’analyser aussi bien les concepts forgés que les outils et les dispositifs mis en œuvre. 

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Rémi Bercovitz

Papers

Ressources paysagères et ressources énergétiques dans les montagnes sud-européennes. Histoire, comparaison, expérimentation

L’invention de la médiation paysagère