Written by Fred Oliver on 05 March Posted in Alumni Portrait. In addition to confirming my interest in urban planning, this year also allowed me to broaden my horizon.
At the beginning of the school year, I quite naturally joined STU. Yes, I was supposed to go to Lima for an internship in a public water management company but I had to cancel shortly before the departure because of a visa problem. So I started looking for an internship late in the year, which was not really easy. On the one hand, I discovered an environment in which I would never have spontaneously sought an internship or a job.
On the other hand, as I was in a rather small structure, I was given more responsibilities than I could have hoped for elsewhere. The mission consisted in promoting, with a local authority, an economic recovery strategy. What levers could be used to revive a medium-sized town in decline Lourdes , whose historical specificity the pilgrimage economy had isolated it from the surrounding mountain areas, as well as from the industrial basin of Tarbes?
It was not easy but very stimulating. We don't necessarily say it enough in STU, but there are really great subjects to work on in rural areas. I didn't really try to go into this theme in depth. I decided to seize the opportunity and I worked on a city in decline. But the situation was nothing like the internship in the Pyrenees. In Guinea, as in a number of African countries, entire towns have sometimes been created from scratch to meet the needs of the extractive industry, often mining.
In Fria, the factory in question, which kept the town running for 40 years now with 50, inhabitants , closed suddenly two and a half years ago. The managers literally abandoned the town - bauxite mining was no longer profitable - and suddenly stopped offering work. Basically, overnight, the executives abandon the site. They leave and leave everything behind. This obviously had disastrous consequences for the town, since its entire economy, but also its entire operation, depended on the plant.
