French Government policy announcements on Peri-Urban
Feb 12, 2016
French Minister for Housing, Territorial Equality and Rural Affairs, Sylvia Pinel has launched a plan for peri-urban areas with particular regard to plans for house building.
French Minister for Housing, Territorial Equality and Rural Affairs, Sylvia Pinel has launched a plan for peri-urban areas with particular regard to plans for house building. Mme Pinel has launched a plan for peri-urban areas with particular regard to plans for house building. She announced the formation of a special platform to carry out an inventory of innovative schemes, a “lab du Péri-urbain”, as well as a series of working groups made up of central government, local communities and businesses to look at development in peri-urban areas, to share expertise and to help bring forward innovative projects of work.
Mme. Pinel emphasised the fact that it is peri-urban areas that have seen the highest levels of development in recent years and are now home to almost a third of French citizens. She emphasised the key role and opportunity that peri-urban areas represent but at the same time acknowledged the p[particular challenges they face. She went as far as to suggest that she was convinced that peri-urban areas offered a glimpse into the lifestyles of the future and were vital to the future of the country. Her focus was very much upon improving quality of life for residents and businesses and declared the need for special measures to be introduced to support small businesses in peri-urban areas which struggle to compete with urban business centres.
At the same time Mme.. Pinel called for the customisation of a number of special instruments that have already been developed as part of a larger programme. of measures designed to assist rural development so that they are of equal benefit to peri-urban areas. She cited for example special support programmes for smaller towns and mobility initiatives.
More details on the November announcement can be found, in French, at:
http://www.territoires.gouv.fr/sylvia-pinel-annonce-des-actions-en-faveur-des-territoires-periurbains
The minister’s announcement came hot on the heels of a number of related developments. Back in September Mme. Pinel had taken delivery of a piece of work commissioned from the General Council for the Environment and Sustainable development (CGEDD), which set out the need for a strategy specific to peri-urban areas and which called for a broad review and reconsideration of the governance and policy implications which this implied. The same report also attempted to set out a definition of peri-urban, describing it as a “hybrid space” between the town and the countryside where one might find high levels of residential development and which face particular challenges in terms of energy supply, dependence on the car and service provision.
The report itself may be found here:
Requalifier les campagnes urbaines de France : Une stratégie pour la gestion des franges et des territoires périurbains (PDF- 18.4 Mo)