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Consequently, we had to rethink the idea of environment. It seems that urban growth and all of the socio-environmental problems arising in the public sphere provoke thoughts about the relationships between rural and urban homes, between farmers, rural and town dwellers, between the town and the country, as analytical categories of socio-territorial processes. The analysis of socio-productive systems is one point of view of urban/rural relationships. Urban areas, their growth, the spread of towns as well as the role of nature in towns are the key to answering these questions. More generally, towns have high stakes in the issues concerning North/South and East/South development as shown by the questions linked to sustainable urban development.
This involves an evaluation of current socio-territorial processes and carrying out a retrospective consideration of environmental questions ; how does the unequal development of territories and living conditions oblige one to reconsider the approach to the environment by social sciences ? The social question of the environment does not lie in the sustainable economic development of natural resources, with all that this entails relative to economic and social plans. This would be to forget that it is above all a home for its inhabitants. Consequently, it is evident that it is impossible for one section of the population to make good use of new possibilities in terms of mobility, as they are prisoners of their environment ; another section has access to a multiple- environment, rich in terms of residential capital, profiting from each others’ natural and cultural resources, In the rural areas of the Northern and Eastern countries, or even in “marginal” regions , social fragmentation goes hand in hand with landscape and ecological homogenisation, due to specialisation in production, territorial innovation and abandon ; in the Southern countries, several factors are intertwined : rural exodus, the consequences of which have not yet been measured, ecological decline, which is difficult to define, the reconversion of rural areas into industrial agricultural areas which homogenises the landscapes, and the conservation of family-run agriculture and its associated mosaic of landscapes. In this context, the environment finds itself held up as a socio- ecological question, but also as a social question which notably reflects problems of competition for land which are not entirely social themselves, but economic. The enhancement of the idea of landscape, in the sense of a simultaneous awareness of its natural and functional content, its aesthetic attractiveness and its qualities as an environment in which to live, is the result of this need to re-create the environmental and social stakes. Here, there is a challenge regarding a wider social transposition of approaches like that of landscape ecology or biogeography, for example.