Editorial : Coastal Urbanization, A New Frontier
- May 9
- 3 min read
By Pablo Diaz, Economist and Director, Sciences Po Rennes, and Xavier Crépin, Architect and Urban Planner, Lead for the Urban School “Cities and Urban Environment,” Sciences Po Rennes
By dedicating its second session to the theme of coastalization, the Organic Cities conference, “French West Coast, the rush to the West,” has shone a spotlight on a now global phenomenon: the continuous movement of populations toward maritime coastlines, particularly in France in recent years.
This dynamic reveals a blind spot in territorial policies that have long been structured around other divides: capital versus provinces, metropolitan areas versus medium-sized cities, urban territories versus rural spaces, and more recently the “empty diagonal” contrasted with attractive regions.
Choosing Sciences Po Rennes to host this conference in September 2025 is both an honor and a recognition of our institution’s ambition to be a humanist school, attentive to major contemporary transformations and committed to contributing, collectively, to a better understanding of the world.
Through its various chairs and its Urban School “Cities and Urban Environment,” created three years ago around several Master’s programs and soon an e-MBA dedicated to organic urbanism, the Institute is developing a line of inquiry on coastal territories and their transformations. Yet beyond the network of Atlantic arc cities, these issues had rarely been the subject of dedicated reflection.
This issue is also an opportunity to acknowledge the commitment of the association AdP – Villes en Développement, a longstanding partner for over twenty years. Together, we have contributed to promoting and sharing the challenges of urban development in countries of the Global South, both as a driver of economic and social development and as a major environmental challenge. Its support for teaching dedicated to urban services has been instrumental in integrating this dimension into our curricula.
Dedicating a conference to territorial polarization, with the support of the OFCE for the quality of its statistical and economic analyses, represented a challenge successfully met by the consultancy Villes Vivantes. Its director, David Miet, sheds light on the transformations underway, drawing on field experience supporting numerous local authorities seeking to guide their development through urban quality, and through new approaches based on gentle densification, while accompanying populations facing these challenges on a daily basis.
Among the seventy speakers whose contributions—both written and video—are available on the conference website, this issue offers a series of articles aimed at addressing the key ideas and challenges of coastal urbanization, as well as solutions already tested in different territories.
Analyzing the complexity of these transformations requires understanding such developments through their multi-actor dimension and through comparison with other geographies. The themes addressed include the preservation of natural spaces, mobility, environmental constraints and risks, models of urbanization that respond to issues of social acceptability, industrial and economic development, and tourism dynamics.
Ultimately, this bulletin invites us to question the relevance of public policies to be invented and adapted, to be structured around innovative strategies, taking into account the opportunities and constraints of each territory, as well as the management of controversies and tensions that these transformations will generate among inhabitants.
With more than 600 participants gathered over two days of intense exchanges, this conference marks an important step in a debate that is set to continue. A next session is already planned for 2027, with the aim of focusing on other regions of the world facing similar dynamics.
(translation from French text using AI Chat GPT)
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