La notion de rural et les rapports ville-campagne en France. Des annees cinquante aux annees quatre-vingts

The important transformations of the french "rural space" and the different forms of reconstitution of rural economies and societies require new insights into the concepts of "rurality" and "countryside". The relevance of these categories of spatial analysis must be revisited, and we have to identify the consequences of the observed changes on the concepts themselves. On the one hand, the relation with the landscape and the agricultural activity is vanishing ; at the same time, the employment in secondary and tertiary activities is growing, and the residential function of this space is enhanced ; a complete reversal of the social representations appears. On the other hand, the relations of this "rural space" strongly re-emerge with the concepts of nature, milieu, and natural ressources, due to the rise of environmental concerns, and to the new valorisation of landscape in the thinking of spatial differenciation. Moreover, the prominent place taken by the concept of crisis in the analysis of spatial dynamics is introducing a new factor, with a tendancy to erase the rural/urban cleavage to the advantage of the concept of locality. We'll try to define the consequences of these contradictory moves on the possibility to identify new divisions of rural space, i.e. the new spatial categories resulting from these recompositions. We'll try also to compare them with the previous typologies, more often proposed without integrating the environmental dimensions.