Always further from cities. Residential dispersion had begun long before the Covid-19 pandemic. Several concomitant demographic movements, driven by retirees, senior executives and, now, teleworkers, explain periurbanisation, the attraction for the coasts as well as a subtle “hierarchy of territories” based on landscape and service assets. These territorial issues will be debated on Thursday, January 19, in Paris, during a symposium organized by The worldin partnership with Forum vies mobilesa mobility research institute.
The numbers speak for themselves. In 1990, with 1.4 million inhabitants, Pas-de-Calais was the fifth most populated department in France. In 2008, he still ranked eighth. In 2022, having kept substantially the same population, it is relegated to eleventh place. In the same period, the Gironde, which was the eleventh department in this same classification by population in 1990, rose to eighth place in 2008 then to sixth in 2022, with almost 1.7 million inhabitants, or 450,000 more than in 1990.
Within the attractive departments, it is not the big cities that are growing the most. Morbihan gained 60,000 inhabitants between 2008 and 2022, while Vannes, its prefecture, retained roughly the same population, and Lorient, the largest city, tended to lose some. On the other hand, municipalities located in the first ring of Vannes have experienced impressive growth. These transfers of population to residential areas, where the vast majority of journeys are motorized, cancel out all the efforts of urban municipalities to limit the nuisance of private cars.
As for Ile-de-France, which 240,000 people leave each year, it has become the least attractive region of all. “For more than forty years, people leaving the region have outnumbered people entering”writes the INSEE.
Fill schools and businesses
The “Rush to the West” – a real or imagined west – will be confirmed by post-pandemic figures, available “within two to three years”, as Christophe Bergouignan, director of the Institute for Demographic Studies at the University of Bordeaux, points out. Medium-sized cities, marked by devitalization, hope that these demographic changes will enable them to accommodate more inhabitants and activities. At the same time, the rural departments seek to transform passing tourists into year-round residents, in order to fill schools and businesses.
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