Reinventing the attractiveness of borders in the French Alps: the challenge of access to lodging in a tourist context

Abstract

This article seeks to understand how relatively isolated French Alpine valleys are influenced by economic (tourism, real estate market, etc.) and demographic (in settling inhabitants, gentrification, etc.) dynamics which can act in contradictory ways, both as development factors and as obstacles to the sustainability of the settlement of pleasure migrants. The objective of this article is to examine precisely the difficulties of access to housing and the different characteristics of the phenomenon of rural gentrification in the context of the high alpine valleys (profiles of new arrivals, co-presence of users). It is a question of understanding the complexity of the phenomenon through the analysis of the real estate market and of identifying the difficulties in terms of socio-spatial inequalities specific to these territories. This article proposes to analyze the impact of tourism activity according to the settlement of inhabitants and through the prism of the long-term attractiveness of the regions.