Collaborative Workspaces in Rural Areas: The Hypothesis of Territorial Adherence[Espaces de travail collaboratifs en milieu rural : l'hypothèse de l'adhérence territoriale]

This article aims to shed light on the residential mobility of neo-rural users of collaborative workspaces (CWS) in remote and fragile countryside. Beyond the general factors of installation of city dwellers in rural areas, we come back to the role of CWS in this mobility, often associated with a wider professional and personal life project. We seek to characterize the territoriality of these CWS users by introducing as a hypothesis the concept of "adherence", which is more adequate than the figures of embeddedness or anchoring to apprehend the specificities of this type of residential migration. We show that adherence to the territory goes through three stages: geographical mobility, frequentation of the CWS and activation of latent resources. The reversible character of the installation is underlined, thus proposing a dynamic reading of the contribution of the CWS to the establishment in rural areas and to local development. This research is based on in-depth surveys of CWS users in Brittany and New Aquitaine.