The relevance of rural-urban studies to explore exurban and back-to-the-land migrations has been well established. This paper seeks to explore this issue from the farmers perspective. The French context, adding a residential attractiveness of the countryside that is noticeable in all the developped countries and a demographic growth that makes exception in Europe, put French farmers face to a critical issue of cohabitation. A previous research established the ability of French farmers to relate to their neighbours. From a data-set of 13 focus groups and 16 « with wellies » farm interviews conducted in western France from 2009 to 2011, a first step of the analysis enabled a general mapping of the urban spatial features that are noticeable in the countryside. In this paper, we investigate more acutely this data set with three questions. The first one is « how does the residential attractiveness change the uses and the values of agricultural spaces at local scale? ». The second one is « how farmers deal with new neighbours to maintain or increase the resilience of their farm systems ? » The third one is « How does a rural residence impact the representations of agriculture ? ». Our results suggest that comtemporary scientific litterature under-estimates the ability of farmers to incorporate urban values from the experience of vicinity with urban neighbours and the role of rural settlements to build in the general population more balanced representations of farming than the metropolitan ones.

The relevance of rural-urban studies to explore exurban and back-to-the-land migrations has been well established. This paper seeks to explore this issue from the farmers perspective. The French context, adding a residential attractiveness of the countryside that is noticeable in all the developped countries and a demographic growth that makes exception in Europe, put French farmers face to a critical issue of cohabitation. A previous research established the ability of French farmers to relate to their neighbours. From a data-set of 13 focus groups and 16 « with wellies » farm interviews conducted in western France from 2009 to 2011, a first step of the analysis enabled a general mapping of the urban spatial features that are noticeable in the countryside. In this paper, we investigate more acutely this data set with three questions. The first one is « how does the residential attractiveness change the uses and the values of agricultural spaces at local scale? ». The second one is « how farmers deal with new neighbours to maintain or increase the resilience of their farm systems ? » The third one is « How does a rural residence impact the representations of agriculture ? ». Our results suggest that comtemporary scientific litterature under-estimates the ability of farmers to incorporate urban values from the experience of vicinity with urban neighbours and the role of rural settlements to build in the general population more balanced representations of farming than the metropolitan ones.