Dn the wake of the health crisis, it is not surprising that the pavilion with garden, located at a distance from the big city but without being too far from it, continues to be the ideal habitat in the performances social of the French. From 1945 to the present day, statistics consistently show that 80% of French families show a clear inclination for single-family homes with gardens. France thus has more than 20 million individual houses out of a total of 37 million dwellings.
Attachment to the pavilion is explained by a habit cultural made up of positive social representations of the house. The inhabitants appreciate being able to take full ownership of the different spaces, to fit them out, arrange them or transform them as they wish, to have their own corners and nothing but their own (workshop, office, etc.). Families also aspire not to be physically locked up in a collective building and legally subject to co-ownership regulations. The inhabitant of a pavilion has the freedom to isolate themselves from their neighbors and to play with their children in their garden. Home ownership allows you to acquire a stable, secure residential status, synonymous with building up a heritage, which is far from trivial before retirement. Furthermore, the purchase of a pavilion in a subdivision is worth admission to a “residential club”: one integrates a group of residents benefiting from a distinctive and specific social, environmental and security universe. The housing estates, far from the dangers and nuisances of car traffic, offer relatively safe spaces for children.
Moreover, the house with garden stands out as the urban form that best responds to what is akin to a real anthropological turning point in our ways of living. The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed to what extent the pavilion with garden appears as a “total accommodation” that can accommodate a wide variety of activities and even sociabilities, as it lends itself easily to new appropriations, occupations and aspirations, to start with telework, leisure or even the maintenance of your body, in addition to traditional activities such as cooking, gardening or DIY.
Total self-expression
In other words, the individual house manifests, after several periods of confinement, all its potential, and consequently, all its structural plasticity both in terms of spaces and temporalities and ways of living. It is in the individual habitat that total self-expression has been most possible. As shown by the surge in selling prices, the enthusiasm for suburban housing has been unprecedented since the Covid-19 pandemic: it is obvious to the greatest number of people, despite scholarly, media and political criticism, formulated for example against “urban sprawl”.
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