Projets de Paysage (Jan 2012)
L’urbanisme balnéaire : processus de colonisation ou aménagement durable du littoral ?
Abstract
In the 19th century, the outcome of the vast stabilisation campaigns for the French coasts had the result to make building lands close to the beaches available, at the very moment where the expansion of water recreation and sea bathing gave them a new purpose. Indeed, the increasing discomfort of the industrial cities and also the swift expansion of the railway helped the favoured social classes of Western Europe rediscover the therapeutic and urbane assets of holiday resorts – first by taking possession of the health resorts, and then by moving in these “new cities” that are the seaside resorts. The latter appeared to be a fruitful financial investment for real estate developers who, after the success of Brighton in England and Deauville in France, started building hundreds of them on the coasts of the Channel and of the Atlantic, and then, at a later date, on the Mediterranean Coast. These resorts are built on particularly malleable soils – so, which are favourable for a new beginning, and they are set together in the mere goal to optimize the physical and visual relationship between the buildings and the beach. All the resorts were conceived on an identical urban development plan: an orthogonal chequering leant on the seafront. The almost systematic repetition of this urban design harks back to the colonial cities and the rare relationships they have with the territory on which they were built. Despite a highly creative architecture, the seaside resorts have a tendency to look like one another, both in their shapes and in the way they respond to a unique social desire: sea bathing. Some exceptions appear through this monotony though, and Sables-d’Or-les-Pins is one of them. Conceived as a seaside “city-park”, but established in a complex and accomplished game of relationships with the whole territory, it is the work of an original building contractor and two landscapers. Their project does not start with a clean slate, but as a new organisation of a territory – based on a solid knowledge of past customs, and open to new ones.
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