Industrial Ecology and the Building of Territorial Knowledge: DEPART, a French Research Action Program Implemented in Harbor Territories

Industrial ecology explores the analogical relationships between biological ecosystems and anthropogenic systems, in order to optimize the latter‘s resource management inspired by the former's mechanisms. A renewed conception of industrial ecology consists in considering it as the building process of a collective territorial knowledge, in its two complementary dimensions: the development of a collective knowledge and the development of the collective through knowledge. It proposes a collaborative construction of a territorial definition, through the sharing and mutualization of information flow, transmitted by the territory and interpreted by actors, leading to a collective decision process.