The Gier valley, forgotten between Saint-Etienne and Lyon?
The Gier valley is a narrow notch in the eastern edge of the Massif Central, but also a historic boundary between Lyonnais and Forez. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the waters of the Gier were used as a driving force for the massive industrialization of this territory. This long post-industrial artery is today questioned: between deserted factories and green hillsides, how to support this changing territory?
Rue89Lyon is a partner of the urban and public school every week a forum proposed by speakers of the conference cycle “Anthropocene Wednesdays“. Below, a text signed by Christelle Morel Journel (who will be present at the conference on December 8) and Georges Gay.
“High place” of past industrial development, today part of the metropolitan system, without however benefiting, the “Gier valley” is the subject of renewed interest from the part of the actors of the Lyon-Saint-Etienne metropolis, practitioners and researchers. The Urban School of Lyon and its director Michel Lussault see in it a “revealer of anthropocene issues”.
Putting the geographical evidence of the Gier valley in historical perspective allows us to show it for a complexity that leads to pleading a resolutely metropolitan prospective approach, inscribed in a reference frame of anthropocene anticipation.
The Gier river and its valley: an industrial “creation”
At the end of the 18thth century, the Gier valley is made up of two clearly differentiated productive areas: to the east, a mining area centered on the Rive de Gier, dependent on Lyon; to the west, around Saint-Chamond, a land of factories (ribbons, nails) in competition with Saint-Etienne. Trade and flows are already transforming the valley: the opening of the Loire to navigation feeds a meridian flow from the Rhône, through the Pilat massif, while in 1780, the opening of the Givors canal stimulates coal mining and a first industrialization (glassworks) of Rive de Gier.
At the beginning of the 19th century, a renewed political and economic context, the spherical basin is of strategic interest which leads mining engineers in an industrial project based on local mineral resources and the railroad.
The “valley of the Gier”, integrated by the railroad, is covered with large metallurgical factories, various industrial establishments and new agglomerations, which confers it a homogeneity of landscape, which makes it “exist”. At the end of the 19thth century, the productive systems are integrated into a larger regional unit where the valley of the Gier becomes the eastern wing of the Saint-Etienne basin. It is this situation which is hit hard by deindustrialisation and the logic of globalization.
A discontinuous agenda for the valley in metropolitan development policies
In the 1960s, the metropolitan area of Lyon and Saint-Etienne was promulgated as a “balanced metropolis” but the Gier valley was little invested in development projects. Subsequently, this metropolitan vision weakened: the “Lyon 2010” master plan for development and town planning (SDAU) projects development towards the east. Saint-Etienne Métropole, created in 1995, has to deal with the mistrust of certain mayors of the valley who do not join it until late, and is struggling to develop strategic planning).
In 2007, the State, through the territorial planning directive (DTA), updated its vision, favoring a limitation of space consumption and urban recycling. This new paradigm puts the Gier valley back on the agenda. It was not until 2014 that the Metropolitan Pole, created in 2012, made it a subject of reflection, unfortunately disconnected from the foresight developed by the Lyon urban region, which disappeared in 2015. This reflection was then taken over by the Development Councils. the four public inter-municipal cooperation establishments (EPCI).
The strategy is mainly based on “neo-industrialization” (Saint-Etienne Métropole Development Council, 2013) which, although linked to other sectors of activity and other scales, nonetheless perpetuates a narrow vision of this territory.
An essential foresight on a metropolitan scale
At the end of the 2010s, the Metropolitan Pole commissioned the two town planning agencies of Lyon and Saint-Etienne to carry out a study on the Gier valley, a “territory of metropolitan interest” which gave priority to improving the “condition. metropolitan ”of the inhabitants of the valley.
This presupposes an ambitious forward-looking approach around the Gier valley, from a resolutely anthropocene perspective. The challenge is to go beyond the functionalist representations of “subordinate” or “servant” territory to take literally the attention paid to the “urban condition” promised by the updating of the political project of the Metropolis of Lyon.
In this perspective, the association of the valley bottom, still locked in a sectorized approach to development, and hill urbanization, which organizes the daily life of the inhabitants, offers the Gier valley the laboratory of diffuse urbanity. based on multiple territorialities, applicable to the entire metropolitan area.
“The Gier valley, prospective territory ”. This “Anthropocene Wednesdays” session will exceptionally take place at Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne (Bâtiment des Forges). Updates and conference information available online.
With :
– Ludovic Meyer, Deputy Director of Epures, Urban Planning Agency for the Stéphane region.
– Christelle Morel Journel, lecturer in geography and planning at the faculty of human and social sciences of the Jean-Monnet University of Saint-Étienne and researcher at EVS-Isthme. She is a member of the Strategic Orientation Committee of the “Intelligences of Urban Worlds” LabEx (University of Lyon). His research focuses on the strategies of (re) development of industrial cities, the transformations of urban planning tools and policies and the processes of territorial devaluation.
Animations: Quentin Dassibat, PhD student in urban environmental sciences at the Urban School of Lyon / École des Mines de Saint-Étienne.