Territorial revitalization: a key milestone toward a shared concept[Hitos para una construcción colaborativa del concepto de revitalización territorial]

Although the expression "revitalisation" appears more frequently in the field of public policy, particularly in France since the mid-1990s, it remains unexplored by researchers. Often linked to territorial issues, revitalisation is a fuzzy concept, both in the field of public action and in scientific publications. Characterizing this process to discriminate it from other territorial dynamics is, however, a real academic and practical challenge to better support public policies by clarifying the elements of diagnosis, the roles of actors and the modalities of its implementation. Building on experiments carried out in several fields of territorial policies in the region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté (France), our interdisciplinary group of researchers has therefore set out to conceptualise the "territorial revitalisation" with an open perspective that is expected to be further developed through other experiences. This paper thus initiates a collective intelligence approach aiming at the co-construction of an evolving concept, based on studied and/or supported revitalisation experiences, with other researchers and actors taking part in such processes. Based on a synthesis of the knowledge, resulting from a cognitive analysis of the discourse on a specially prepared corpus, we set out the interdisciplinary approach that made it possible to articulate differentiated but complementary theoretical frameworks via a series of keys for reading the territory as a complex system. Our conceptualization of territorial revitalization is based on five principles, introduced by the case study on the deployment of the Techn'hom project in Belfort, from the 2000s to the present day. This example calls for further case studies to refine and make the concept operational.