Towards Suburban Regimes? The Political Autonomy of Suburban Territories as a Key to Reading the Recomposition of Institutional Relations Between the State and the Territories in France (1981-2015)

The three Acts of decentralization in France (1981-2015) reveal how the territories have seized economic competence to ensure their political autonomy. The first two Acts of decentralization in France (1981 and 1999) greatly contributed to the fragmentation of territories by dispersing economic competence on all scales of territorial organization. They have contributed to the institutionalization of political regimes. This is particularly the case in the peripheral territories of metropolitan areas. The notion of regime (Stone, 1989 ; Stocker, 1995) is then used to characterize: (a)The “Communal Block” as an institutional foundation, (b) Productive loosening as an economic foundation, (c) The instrumentation of state rescaling in the field of spatial planning as the basis of organization. Act 3 of decentralization, which came to fruition in 2015 with the NOTRe law (New Organization of the territory of the Republic) articulates economic competence around Intercommunalities and Regions. In suburban areas, the tensions that arise from this institutional reorganization give opportunity to a plurality of actions. AFC mobilize action resources (Lamberet, Pflieger 2016) in a differentiated way by: (a) Mobilizing their portfolio of available resources: land (economic rather than residential), heritage (business infrastructures), economic (zones and business parks); (b) Activating their latent resources in terms of expertise (territorial engineering) and politics (governance of the Communal Block); (c) Instrumenting the scalar institutional resources of public policies (SCoT, Department, Metropolis, Region). Their diversity makes possible to examine how economic development drives growth coalitions and their capacity to make political territory. Using the example of the territories near the Metropolis of Lyon, provides information, in turn, on the extent of political autonomy of these territories: between territories " servants ”of the metropoles and “ dominant ” territories of their peripheral campaigns. Above all, suburban regimes seek their political autonomy in their capacity to assemble their resources for action, on the one hand, and instrumentation of engineering skills between territorial scales, on the other.