HAS at a time when our planet’s resources are running out, when citizens have understood the importance of actively fighting against food waste or ” fast-fashion » [l’achat de vêtements de faible qualité pour une courte durée], an equally important subject does not however make the headlines: that of the waste of the square meters of our cities. For many years, cities have been built with monofunctional buildings, the fruit of decades spent thinking of the city by specialization. So many generations of elected officials rocked by this absurd “doctrine” of the large single-use totemic public building. So many mayors have been delighted to build a school here, a gymnasium there, an apartment or office building, without really thinking about the intensity of their use.
If the way of conceiving the city has evolved, it is clear that we still live in the heart of an immense mess. Although there are not yet precise data allowing to characterize it, one can at least estimate it, and the figures make think. Indeed, long before the Covid-19 pandemic and the advent of the telecommuting revolution, an office building already showed a relatively poor utilization rate, around 30% of the time over the year. A school, around 20%. Not to mention more than 8,000 industrial wastelands or more than 8% vacant units on French territory. Such mismanagement of time and space in the city is not inevitable!
Because the benefits of intense, maximized use are numerous. They are first of all environmental: through more intense use of buildings, the need for new constructions – and, consequently, the consumption of the associated natural resources – could decrease. Beneficial, because their environmental impact is enormous: greenhouse gas emissions linked to the construction or renovation of buildings, and those linked to their use, today represent a quarter of national emissions ! And, with less urban sprawl, less soil, and preserved biodiversity, wouldn’t this perhaps be the beginning of a response to the “zero net artificialisation” imperatives of the Climate and Resilience Act?
New sources of revenue
A maximized intensity of use is also the promise of a new social dynamic, an improved urban quality thanks to the “friction of uses”: different audiences brought to meet or rub shoulders more, creating or reinforcing dynamics within neighborhoods. It is also, potentially, an increase in the supply of associated services for the inhabitants or users of a site: tomorrow, in a nearby area, they will be able to benefit from additional services to which they could not have claimed other.
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