Context

Territorial projects are increasingly being thwarted, whatever their size or nature. Previously, the impossibility of fighting a project was internalized: "it's going to happen anyway". But over the past decade or so, examples of project abandonment have multiplied, demonstrating the possibility of neutralizing projects. Examples include the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport, the Sivens dam and the Roybon Center Parc. "A project from the last century is an outdated project". And with good reason: each decade brings a new and complementary model of a project's components.

The major characteristic of a territorial project is that it combines a project and a territory. It involves all the difficulties intrinsic to managing a project in isolation, plus interactions with the territory and its inhabitants, in multiple dimensions. Here are just a few examples of territorial...