Espace populations sociétés (Jan 2020)
Le retour de l’habitat vertical et les politiques TOD (Transit Oriented Development) dans les villes françaises : vers une intensification urbaine socialement sélective ?
Abstract
This paper give insight into the return of high-rise residential buildings in french cities (97 identified as january 2018). Office towers which are far less numerous than residential ones, have paradoxically been the main focus of attention. Our intention here is to shed a light on the high-rise residential boom particularly visible is spaces of regeneration (Appert, 2016). High-rise living, for long associated with social housing, deprivation and the demise of public estates, has been reconsidered, especially within the context of sustainability and Transit Oriented Development (Appert, 2016). TOD policies that embodied planning for the compact city model (Bentayou et al., 2015), are based on the coordination of transport and planning policies and investments in order to reduce the volume and length of motorized trips. The coordination of theses policies translates into higher density and more mixed developments on previously development land, close to public transport nodes. This partial re-urbanisation is capable of transforming the social composition of the city as the housing stock deliverance appear to be much more dedicated to specific social groups targeted by developers (Dubois et Van Criekingen, 2006, Jones et Ley, 2016). In this paper, we first show that contemporary residential towers, contrary to their stigmatized Grands Ensembles counterparts built in the 1960s and 1970s (Gilbert, 2012), are being built in pericentral areas of french major cities, close to transport networks interchanges. We then demonstrate that these high-rise projects are justified by their promoters and regulators through narrations of TOD policies and aspirations. We finally show that these attractive locations inside cities benefit most to wealthy and/or small size households. The research undertaken is based on the creation of a new database on high-rise residential buildings in France (2015-2020) and the analysis of their location patterns in context. It is also based on several interviews of developers, local authority practitioners and real estate actors for seven developments in the Lyon metropolitan area. While contributing on researches on spaces of contemporary living, this paper introduces the less documented phenomenon of residential verticalization in France.
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