Cybergeo (May 2024)
La fabrique publique/privée des données de planification urbaine en France : entre logique gestionnaire et approche territorialisée de la règle
Abstract
The issue of territorial data is of growing importance to the State, which aims to guide their production, circulation and conditions of use. This article examines how the State is repositioning itself vis-à-vis local authorities regarding urban planning regulations, in the context of the standardization and digitization of data from local urban development plans. It also explores the integration of these data into a single geo-platform. We demonstrate that this project to build a common tool on a national scale is part of a central government takeover of urban planning data through the partial integration of private methods developed by commercial companies during the 2010s, facilitated by the open data process. Studying the public/private production of regulatory urban planning data highlights two key aspects in the reconfiguration of State action regarding territories: on the one hand, the emergence of tension between a managerial logic of data and a territorially adapted approach to regulation, suited to the context of local projects, raises the question of a reassertion of the State in terms of urban planning regulations and a potential prevalence of "predefined boxes" over the nuanced and contextualized logic of the rule; on the other hand, the digitization and standardization of urban planning data establish the conditions for a technical instrumentation of territories to facilitate their monitoring and control through quantified territorial comparisons. This study concludes to a complexification of the contemporary production of territorial data while highlighting the importance of monitoring these data to grasp the issues embodied in new types of hybrid instruments for State steering of local action.
Keywords
