“Faced with the goal of net zero artificiality, let’s not sterilely oppose individual pavilions and collective housing”

“Pavilion, a dream that comes true”, “The government is stuck in concreting the soil”… The ecological goal of limiting land use for urbanization appears to be radically formulated, on the one hand questioning the ‘pavilion-garden-car’ lifestyle and, for many municipalities, prohibiting the expansion of urbanized territory. But the question is probably badly asked. Because the city, as a complex system, does not function in a linear way and these rigid visions are likely to generate a lack of construction land, highlighting the housing crisis and at the same time putting the French against this policy because they want more than 80%. A single-family home, a desire that has been confirmed in every survey since 1947.

First, we must consider the term “art” as used when talking about the expansion of urbanization. Because in terms of biodiversity, industrial agriculture leads to much more artificial soil than individual home gardens or urban parks. The neologism “deruralization” would be more appropriate because it implies a transition from rural to urban land use, without mentioning the specific technical consequences, which are in fact very different.

The goal of protecting agricultural land is important for food security, but, to clarify the debate, it should not be confused with the preservation of biodiversity. Similarly, the Manichean opposition between the individual home and the collective dwelling, which intersects the debate around objective “zero pure artificiality”, is counterproductive.

Apart from collective housing, an individual house is not a standard product. Between the diffuse suburban sector, which leads to a density of 12 to 20 dwellings per hectare, and the housing, which makes it possible to reach 50 to 60 dwellings per hectare, which exceeds certain collective housing operations, we are not talking about the same type of habitat, nor the agricultural If the same use of natural land.

Some countries, such as the Netherlands or the United Kingdom, have long known how to create dense residential areas. And if we wanted to pay tribute to Philip Panera, Grand Prix of Urbanism (1999), who died on May 12, it would be by defining a real urban planning policy, discovering or rediscovering people, especially with elected officials, his work written with David Mangin, another Grand Prix d’urbanisme (2008). their book urban project (Parentèses, 1999) is devoted to the design of subdivisions based on the rational division of land, allowing the optimization of the “deruralization” of soils.