Sustainable Territorial Development: a new Approach of Rural Development

The main purpose of this paper is to fix the theoretical foundations of territorial development as an approach to understand the rural development. It was Phhilippe Aydalot, a quarter of century ago, who started to build that theory. We will then propose a reconfiguration of this development model with the concept of "inclusive territorial development", implicitly including the concept of sustainability. We will then see how this model, focusing on inclusive development, can support a new rural development perspective, the sustainable rural development, a perspective necessary for successful development of rural areas. The concept of sustainable territorial development can be enriched by the historical experience of both rural areas from the North and the South. The regional underdevelopment affects these territories like the others. We conclude on the need to think about sustainable rural systems, more sustainable than those that resulted of the modernization of the rural economies.