2023-09-11 20:48:00
DISPATCH — This Monday, September 11, Olivia Grégoire (Minister of Commerce) and Christophe Béchu (Minister of Ecological Transition) presented the plan for the transformation of “ugly France”, these urban areas strictly dedicated to shops which disfigure the surroundings of our cities and pose a risk to the environment.
Since the 1960s, these “peripheral” trade zones have invaded France without stopping. Today there are around 1,500 of them, approximately five times the surface area of Paris. Huge car parks strewn with billboards, stores stacked on top of each other with sheet metal roofs, concrete as far as the eye can see…
The idea of the government is to rebalance these territories by encouraging certain businesses to move to make room for housing, offices, green spaces… To make them real ecological living spaces. In an official press release, the ministers show visual examples of what the commercial areas of tomorrow could be.
To achieve this, Olivia Grégoire already explains that she wants to authorize the relocation of a business without a new building permit being necessary, but also to relax the rules of the local urban plan and the right of pre-emption. If traders will probably be reluctant because of the constraints linked to the move, 24 million euros should be allocated to prefiguration studies and legal and technical support for such projects. The task will remain complex.
“There cannot be a single model. Twenty territories will be selected after the call for expressions of interest for pilot projects”, underlines Emmanuel Le Roch, the president of PROCOS – Federation for the promotion of specialized trade.
On this point, the Minister wants to be reassuring: “A year ago, architects, town planners, local elected officials, traders, property owners, lawyers, developers agreed to work with a simple mandate: to define the areas of tomorrow, identify the obstacles to this transformation, to define the appropriate measures.”
Be that as it may, these new spaces will require titanic worksites. It will therefore be necessary to wait several decades to see the color.
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