#ShapingDavos: Bridging the Urban-Rural Divide

French Urban-Rural divide: a straight way towards FrExit?

During the Davos local panel discussion in Paris, Global Shapers discussed the impact of rural urban gap on the policy program choice in the lights of presidential elections in France in 2017.

Today French community is very divided in its acceptance and approval of the results of BrExit and the US elections.

Alena Kotelnikova, curator of Global Shapers Paris Hub, PhD in Economics of Energy Transition moderated the debate with our speakers:

• Deborah Asseraf is a volunteer at "En Marche", a political movement created by the Young Global Leader Emmanuel Macron. She graduated from Sciences Po Paris in Public Affairs and Law and holds a bachelor in Philosophy.
• Lumir Lapray grew up in a village of 70 and graduated from Sciences Po Lyon, with a double Master’s in Public Policy and Urban Planning. After spending time in the office of Representative Juan Vargas, in California, writing legislation in order to expand access to vote for rural citiziens, she is now back in France. Passionate about social justice, she today mainly focuses on topics pertaining to rural youth, their education and their political involvement. She co-created Les Chemins de la Reussite, an organization that promotes access to higher education for students from rural communities and aims at bringing them together with youth from inner-city to foster discussions around common experiences. Through these endeavors, she wishes to put rural issues on the public, political and media agendas (watch the Davos session below).

Here is what I learned from French experience, and what it could learn from non industrilized countries.

Rurality is a concept difficult to tackle as one single and homogeneous block.

To begin with, the author Davezies cuts France into four groups:

• a productive, market integrated and dynamic France, concentrated in the metropolises;
• a non-productive, non-market integrated but dynamic France, located west of Cherbourg-Nice line, living from tourism, pensions and public wages;
• a productive, market integrated France in difficulty, composed of depressed industrial basins, situated in the northern half but in decline;
• a non-productive, non-market integrated France, in difficulty, and dependent on social income alone.

Closer to this last group, Lumir describes a common characteristic of rurality: poverty.

But as Politics romanticize a rural France of the “real peoples”, revisiting rurality is important.

Bridging the urban rural gap is about reducing inequalities, starting with education and income. So it is necessary to address the real issues: access to public services (especially public transportation and information) and economic problems.

Specifically helping neo rurals is not a priority as urban people moving to rural areas are marginal.

We’d rather focus on inequalities related to rural-urban divide in terms of income/ employment, mobility and education, than erase rural-urban difference.

Employment.

There is a need to encourage entrepreneurship and access to entrepreneurship programs in rural areas in order to increase local income (quality of life) and create local employment opportunities. Service-oriented jobs such as butcher, hairdresser, etc. are of a high demand in rural areas. In order to increase working opportunities and so economical attractivity of rural areas, policy makers may encourage medium-size cities with corresponding employment pools and promote local entrepreneurship.

However, local artisans often lose competition with commercial giants such as Auchan and Carrefour.

There is an arbitrage between agricultural yield management and food self sufficiency promotion, between supermarkets creating direct jobs and local stores, creating indirect ones and cooperatives explore solutions such as smarter and direct distribution (Peligourmet allows individuals to pass together orders grouped in rural territories, that they can collect in big cities).

Mobility.

Good transportation services and coverage may increase quality of life and also attractivity of rural areas. Accessibility of schools, hospital, leasure is to be improved in the rural areas: A home-school trip in rural areas may often take 15 minutes by car but 1.5 hour by public transport.

Many train lines close, and for some rural people to return home on the weekend, it takes up to 8 hours of transport so carpooling has changed the lives of rural people as they have less money, more distance.

But as rurality also relies on family solidarity to keep children, to provide services, etc. it complicates the mobility.

So the challenge is to be able to succeed at home and build on your own values and realities.

What's more, they also are less connected and lack access to information; some rural areas face problems of “white zones” without any internet access and lack of access to high speed deepens the gap with urban millenials who are considered digital natives.

Education.

Access to higher education and information is to be improved in rural areas, valorizing applied and professional educational programs.

In the aeronautical valley there still are plenty of jobs to provide as recruitment is tough.

Urban-Rural inequalities hide economic inequalities.

Even though many trades are not valued, rural youth is oriented towards manual trades by pragmatism to get by.

Media coverage.

There is an urgency to valorize rural lifestyle both in political discourse (especially its media coverage) and social consciousness.

People from rural areas (18% of French population) are rarely properly media covered: you can hear them say ‘People on the screen does not look, speak or behave like us’. Often, they tend to vote for far right/left wing to express their ‘anti-system’ choice: they have an impression that governments don't represent or even sometimes recognise their existence.

Shift in social consciousness.

It is important to improve the image of rural lifestyle in consciousness of rural habitants: there is a self-depreciation from rural people themselves.

In popular belief the success in life is often directly conditioned by leaving the rural area to an urban one. There is a need to encourage young rural talents to stay and succeed in their region.

Political representation.

In terms of votes in the assembly, the country elites are overrepresented: the middle class and the rural elite are different from the rural world.

Rural areas are facing similar difficulties as French overseas departments and territories, where success means leaving, what leads to an uprooting.

Rural people do shorter education cycles and face problems of imprisonment, delinquency, confrontation with the bourgeois elite, self-censorship … As semi urban and 2nd generation immigrants do!

So there are plenty of ways to solve address those issues, while awaiting public policies.

It is possible to find similar discourses between rural and semi-urban in order to create value, instead of the populism and ineffective discourse raising.

In Emerging countries, where WELTARE is dealing with even deeper issues in regards with urban rural gap, private sector has experienced solutions from which we synthetized best practices:

• Access to Information
• Funding local entrepreneurs
• Giving a Platform to express themselves in the public debate
• Giving access to an effective Distribution channel
• Promoting entrepreneurial Leaders

Abiodun Dominic Odunuga, cofounder of Laceup Africa have noticed that when given access to opportunities, people stay where they already are.

In France, Deborah, believes that developing competitiveness hubs and medium-sized cities can incubate more SME’s, creating most of the jobs, can help value the rural image in political discourse and society.

What’s more, universalizing unemployment insurance can ease risk taking and promote local entrepreneurship.

Regarding mobility, free school transport to further primary school can be a first element of social mixity.

Then, being able to resettle from a region to another without public administrative constraints could help as well.

New actors of open and shared economy in sector of mobility, such as kankaroo, and education already have an important impact in rural areas. However, they should not replace public service in these areas but rather complete it.

Nonetheless, recent surveys show, despite 22% of indecisive, that there is not so much French disaffection for Europe.

FrExit is however agreed to be a small-probability event because of good social redistribution system among different classes in France: poor are not as poor as other countries.

What's more, the issue of frExit is more linked to Europe than to the urban rural gap.

Nevertheless, as our panel concluded (watch here), with or without frExit, the problem has to be handled.