HASwhen the list of 74 municipalities and intermunicipalities winners of the “commercial zone transformation program” was announced on March 29, we saw announcements popping up in the media promising us the end of the “Ugly France”. However, it is too early to envisage the end or even the beginning of the end of it…
On the one hand because, materially, the account is not there. The sprinkling of 24 million euros for 74 of the 1,500 commercial zones in France is anecdotal: we are very far from the 5 billion over 5 years of a program such as Action Cœur de Ville, dedicated only to medium-sized towns . The lack of ambition is out of proportion to the media coverage.
But let us admit – nothing is less certain – that this derisory but symbolic investment by the State is a triggering factor which encourages all the players in town planning, housing, distribution, land, etc. to take action. to tackle the problem head on, it would still not be resolved.
Exit from monofunctional zoning
Indeed, at a time of transition, rethinking “ugly France” without rethinking the city as a whole is a cautery on a wooden leg. The main pitfall lies mainly in a framework for dealing with urban issues that is too marked by zoning: we are rethinking our commercial zones as if they were isolated.
Of course, we want to move away from monofunctional zoning (a space devoted to one function) to apply functional diversification… on this same part of the city, but without thinking about its integration into the city. This amounts to overlooking several crucial issues. On the one hand, there is a problem of locating the spaces to be reclassified.
Our city entrances, as their name suggests, are located on the edge of urban entrances, or in the immediate vicinity of road or motorway junctions. Not really the ideal place to think about housing in “the city of tomorrow”, or even to develop renaturation spaces such as urban parks.
Completely review mobility routes
The commercial areas concerned are economically interesting given their particularly efficient accessibility by car: they rely on capturing flows in addition to the attractiveness of their offer. However, changing the present functions will not cause the flows to dry up: all the flows inherent to a city entrance will remain, starting with the commuting flows of residents of peri-urban areas.
This requires completely rethinking mobility routes, reconfiguring the travel chains of city and peri-urban dwellers who pass through there every day, and ultimately changing everyone’s mobility practices. And this therefore requires serious consideration of mobility management which cannot be limited to the perimeter of the reclassified area.
You have 50.67% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.