As we get ready to emerge from the current crisis, one wonders whether there will still be room for such concepts as « local » and « rural ». They were very present during the seventies when softer type of growth was aimed at. A quick leap foreward under the ideology of modernization is now the dominant approach so any local angle may seem of secondary importance. Similarly, the concept of a specific rural society is in doubt under the influence of current social and cultural changes. The specificity of each small region or « terroir» is questioned and if those small regions have no real original features, then rural space must be subjected to the general logic of location analysis. Though two books have predicted the end of « terroirs » and of « peasants » there is still room for a local component for development from the grass roots, in the shaping of new forms of control which are being set up. Particulary in south-western France, where cultural forces are strong, local forces must be given the power to question economic and social aspects of modernization in order to reorient it, not to stop it.
