The Parisian executive made its comeback by presenting a charter for transitional urban planning last Monday. A charter supposed to provide a framework for common-sense practices, initiated most of the time by real estate operators — private and public alike — while obtaining all the administrative and regulatory authorizations to start construction work.
This method, which is clever in avoiding squats and degradations of all kinds, has become over time a living laboratory for testing new uses: artist groups, shelters for people in precarious or excluded situations, start-up incubator...
“Temporary urban planning is one of the solutions to be deployed on a large scale in tomorrow's urban planning”, pleaded Joachim Azan (Novaxia), Simon Laisney (Urban Plateau) and Loïs Moulas (OID) in an op-ed published on Business Immo last June. This charter can be a first element of response if it does not become yet another political recovery from a form of administrative negligence. Because there is always the risk of adding an extra layer to a yarrow that has become indigestible.
Jean-Louis Missika, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of urban planning, architecture, Grand Paris projects, economic development and attractiveness, justifies the need for this charter by the desire not to “freeze square meters” at a time when it is soaring in the capital. This charter should not be just a hide-and-greed for empty buildings. After all, you have to take on the projects when you have the ambition to transform the city. Paris is not a picket fence away. The Data unit of the daily Le Parisien lists no less than 8,000 projects in progress, including a minority (less than 700) managed by the City of Paris.
The temporary should not mask the need to reinvent urban planning that is more flexible, more agile, more flexible in order to meet the social, economic and environmental challenges that are focused on large cities.
And above all, the temporary must remain... temporary. The root of the problem is nevertheless to restore permanent uses to places left fallow by an administrative mechanism that has become too complex and therefore too slow. The commitment to “mobilize public authorities to ensure a faster review of permits” is a bit light.
Guillaume Poitrinal, co-president of Woodeum and author of the book “More quickly, the sick France of its time”, recalled in a tweet that the decision to close the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul hotel — a symbol of the success of transitional urban planning — dates from... 2004.