Camille Le Bivic, has PhD in sociology, and works at the National federation of SAFER, the Rural Land Compagnies in France. She has been a member of PLPR since 2019, when she first attended the annual conference as a PhD student in Ústí nad Labem in 2020.

Camille is researcher on spatial planning and land development issues in rural areas. She obtained her PhD at Université Paris-Saclay in 2020. Following, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Université Gustave Eiffel in the Paris region. Before being researcher, she worked seven years as an architect in France and Peru. Her general background is in land development, sociology and architecture.

She published papers on spatial planning management and practices in rural municipalities under metropolitan and cross-border pressures. She recently coordinated with Joël Idt and Romain Melot a special issue of the journal Town Planning entitled “Urban planning in the context of no net land take: towards a new planning paradigm in Europe?”, in which several PLPR members published articles: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/tpr/96/4.

What are you passionate about?

I am passionate about how actors organize themselves to govern, manage, and transform land and spaces in rural and peri-urban areas. I study this organization through the strategies, practices, and instruments used. I observe that many actors develop skills to negotiate and exploit the leeway offered by regulatory frameworks. In addition, spatial transformations often respond more to demographic, economic, environmental, or sectoral objectives than to spatial strategies. This makes land use planning and development particularly interesting.

What are you working on these days?

I can highlight two topics. The first concerns the purchase of agricultural land by non-farmers for leisure, storage, distancing themselves from their neighbors, or in anticipation of urbanization. The phenomenon is quite similar to “horsification” observed in Belgium or the Netherlands. This raises questions about access to land for new generations of farmers and food sovereignty. I work to better quantify and qualify the phenomenon in order to guide public action. A second topic I am just beginning to work on concerns the impact of sea level rise on land management and agricultural practices in France. This second topic is still in its early stages, and I would be happy to discuss it with members of the PLPR community in order to move things forward.

What brings you to PLPR?

I was doing my PhD, and many of the authors I read were members of PLPR.. My thesis supervisor encouraged me to attend the conference in Usti, and since then I have attended three conferences, each time enjoying meeting up with this dynamic research community.

Anecdote: things we don’t know about you?

I am originally from Brittany, a region of France where agriculture is very dynamic and where land pressure is increasing along the coast due residential and tourist use. This background has certainly influenced my will to contribute to the development of knowledge in the fields of planning, land, and property rights in rural areas.