The Bigourdane technical ceramic nomad and sedentary between heritage and transactional areas

• Main Author: Laurence BARNECHE-MIQUEU
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Etudes Scientifiques Spécialisées Appliquées aux Communications Humaines, Economiques, Sociales et Symboliques 2008-12-01
• Series: Essachess
• Subjects: technical ceramic industry; proximity; impact of place; social networks; poles of competitiveness
• Online Access: http://www.essachess.com/index.php/jcs/article/view/28/18

This chapter introduces the technical ceramic sector in the Hautes Pyrenees county. It aims at presenting the dynamics of recomposition of an industry historically linked to the presence of a local resource: electricity, hydroelectricity which was reconstructed around innovative small and average size industries.We first dwell on the process of decomposition, recomposition of the sector thanks to the perennial reconstitution of the sector we show, starting from the characteristics of the companies which appeared during the decomposition phase of the central actor CERAVER, the intensity of the transformation of the local productive system. The setting inherited from a century long presence of the technical ceramic in the Tarbes region – heritage area – is now linked to a transactional space built through the exchanges taking place within the framework of the pole of competitiveness of ceramic of Limoges, where new actors take part, the Ecole Superieure of the Art of Ceramics and Research Centre on the arts of Fire and Earth.