“The pavilion, a dream that comes to an end”, “The government stuck in the concreting of the soil”… the ecological objective of limiting land consumption for urbanization seems formulated in radical terms, with on the one hand the questioning of the “pavilion-garden-car” way of life and, for many municipalities, the ban on extending their urbanized area. But the question is probably badly posed. Because the city, as a complex system, does not function in a linear way and these rigid visions are likely to generate a shortage of building land, to accentuate the housing crisis, while raising the French against this policy since they wish more than 80% a single-family house, a wish that has been confirmed in all surveys since 1947.
We must first discuss the term “artificialization” used to talk about the extension of urbanization. Because in terms of biodiversity, industrial agriculture induces much more artificial soils than those of the gardens of individual houses or urban parks. The neologism “deruralization” would be more appropriate, because it induces the transition from rural to urban land use, without mentioning the concrete technical consequences which, in fact, vary widely.
The objective of safeguarding agricultural land is important for food security, but, to clarify the debate, it should not be confused with that of preserving biodiversity. In the same way, the Manichean opposition between individual house and collective housing which crosses the debates around the objective “zero net artificialisation” is counter-productive.
No more than collective housing, the individual house is not a standard product. Between a diffuse suburban sector which induces densities of 12 to 20 dwellings per hectare and housing estates making it possible to reach 50 to 60 dwellings per hectare, a figure higher than certain collective housing operations, we are not talking about the same type of habitat nor of the same consumption of agricultural or natural land.
Some countries like the Netherlands or the United Kingdom have long known how to design dense housing estates. And if we wanted to pay tribute to Philippe Panerai, Grand Prix d’urbanisme (1999), who died on May 12, it would be by defining a real urban planning policy, by making people discover or rediscover, in particular with elected officials, his work written with David Mangin, another Grand Prix d’urbanisme (2008). Their book Urban project (Parentèses, 1999) is dedicated to the design of subdivisions based on a rational division of the land allowing to optimize the “deruralization” of the soils.
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