The actors of the living environment present their report "For a renewed vision of individual housing"

This collective approach bringing together the main actors of the sector: Federation of SCoT, National Union of Aménageurs, National Council of the Order of Architects, Professional Office of Qualification of Urban Planners, Housing Pole of the French Building Federation, Federation of Real Estate Developers, Federation Française des Constructeurs de Maisons Individuelles, resulted on December 16 in the delivery to Emmanuelle WARGON, Minister Delegate to the Minister of Ecological Transition, in charge of Housing, of an unprecedented report compiling diagnoses and proposals in order to rethink and then change individual housing. The Minister welcomed the proposals formulated with the greatest attention.

A multidisciplinary working group for a 360 ° approach

Around the Ordre des géomètres-experts, the objective of the working group was to reconcile three imperatives: the trajectory of land sobriety desired by the Government to meet environmental challenges, housing needs in the face of growing pressure on the residential market, and the desire of the French who overwhelmingly want to live in individual dwellings.

The report resulting from the work, available via this link, articulates a diagnosis of the new production of individual housing, the existing stock and the residential aspirations of the French, as well as proposals relating as much to soft urban intensification as to the development of a new offer integrating the issues of land sobriety.

Towards a renewed vision of the living environment

Crises follow one another but the basic needs of our fellow citizens remain. The manufacturing methods of urban spaces and territories must be renewed in order to invent new models of development.

Metropolises have a vision of growth and density, which cannot weigh down the choice to live in small or medium-sized towns, nor the choice to settle in the less dense municipalities which occupy three-quarters of the territory.

Finally, the complementarity of housing typologies (collective, individual, grouped, townhouses), financing methods (home ownership and rental, free and social), services, jobs and equipment increasingly underlines the need for a vision. transversal and prospective.

In a context of doubt about the dominant model, serious housing production crises, and energy and environmental crises, the professions brought together recall how they can, with renewed housing production tools, help bring about political solutions, economic and environmental. With this report, they are pointing towards possible and desirable reforms.

Combine the intensification of the existing fabric and the development of a new offer that is more sober in terms of land tenure: solutions are possible

The professions brought together observe that individual housing, through its flexibility of spatial organization, allows the use of small or complex configuration land areas and represents a relevant response to create a happy proximity density, to deal with discontinuities. urban and territorial, and recycle the urban and peri-urban wastelands of the towns, small towns and medium-sized towns that link our territory.

It is also a means of strengthening the place of secondary and tertiary urban centers, at a time when reducing commuting must be a priority in order to combat greenhouse gas emissions.

For the existing individual housing fabric, a double opportunity for improvement and intensification emerges when it can offer suitable urban forms that are more economical in terms of land. Three areas of work leading to solutions have thus been identified:

• Improve the quality of the existing with pooled approaches at the scale of the territory or the district
• Remove the obstacles, particularly regulatory ones, to densification and create a tax incentive
• Strengthen the operational and professional approach to densification, by promoting innovation and acculturating communities to project planning

In addition, and in particular to respond to the renewed attractiveness of territories that had hitherto been relaxed, the working group also identified three priority areas of intervention for the development of a new offer of individual housing with low land tenure:

• Act on taxation to fight against land retention and encourage the development of the new offer near the employment, service and transport areas and in the established urban sector
• Promote the development of denser forms, by redefining the notion of individual, grouped or organized habitat
• Strengthen the quality of planning and town planning documents, and fight against rules contrary to the objective of land sobriety

The need to take into account the diversity of habitats, needs and territories

“What must be remembered is a pitfall, one that would like us to put individual housing in competition with collective housing. " Joseph Pascual, President of the Superior Council of the Order of Land Surveyors, recalled this during the presentation of the report: "A serene residential course that meets the needs of the French can only be built by integrating the diversity of the types of housing offered: people do not live in the same way during their studies, when the third child arrives, or as we age when we become less mobile. All residential offers must be adapted and contextualized with regard to the expectations of the French and the specific needs of the territories. This territorialization of the national trajectory of land sobriety will necessarily be accompanied by the land experts who are the land surveyors, those involved in development, construction and the living environment. "