Urban renewal: these suburbs looking for a city center

At the foot of the town hall of Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis), in the middle of the towers of social housing, the excavators cut down the last vestiges of the old shopping center with the look of a warehouse which since the 1970s monopolized the heart of this popular city-prefecture.

By 2023, this shopping arcade, or "shoebox", must give way to a brand new district with wide open-air pedestrian streets.

They will offer the 50.000 Balbyniens a multitude of local shops, a six-screen cinema, benches in the shade of trees and refreshing fountains. At the local level, a small urban revolution.

"It's important to have a place where you don't do anything at all. You meet up, you sit on the benches. The teenagers meet, zone out here. That's the role of a city center," explains to AFP the architect Pierre Alain Trévelo, whose agency TVK designed this new district.

Until now in Bobigny, a rural town which has changed thanks to the urban and demographic explosion after the Second World War, "there was no town center", recalls Benjamin Dumas, the director of mayor's office (PCF) Abdel Sadi. "The place to meet was the slab."

The site is part of the effort to renew and revitalize the city center over the long term, where cities mounted on raised slabs and administrative buildings stand side by side.

Revitalize the city center

Designed according to the modern and political architecture of the time, the district emerged from the countryside at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s to integrate a large working population in this traditionally communist city and respond to the housing crisis. But, half a century later, this model has aged badly and is increasingly contested.

Without making a clean sweep of the past, Bobigny has, however, been seeking for the past twenty years to adapt its town planning.

The municipality wants to bring pedestrian traffic, which was high on the slabs or walkways, to ground level, and create a new continuity in the urban fabric.

One of the cities saw its slab demolished and two towers demolished, to open it up to the rest of the town. Another should see part of its slabs disappear. It is in the middle of this set that the new shopping streets must fit.

The old city center "was no longer suitable, especially because of the car, the confiscation of the ground floor," said Mr. Trévelo. "It was necessary to restore the primacy to the pedestrian and to seek to make a unifying part of all that occurs around".

Twenty years of work

On the other side of Ile-de-France, Evry-Courcouronnes holds a similar reasoning. The town hall plans to demolish part of its downtown slab and redevelop the district. A site of at least twenty years.

The capital of Essonne was born from the recent merger of Courcouronnes and Evry, a new town from the 1960s imagined around a slab and a gigantic shopping center which occupies almost half of the heart of the city. city, at a time when the car was king.

"The average inhabitant of Essonne who comes once to Evry, he arrives in a dark and disgusting parking lot, he exits by a staircase which smells of urine and arrives on a slab", sighs the mayor Stéphane Beaudet (ex- LR).

Despite the concentration in this area of ​​essential services for the 70.000 inhabitants (university, court, prefecture, sports center, post ...), the inhospitability of the place dissuades them from lingering there.

According to studies carried out for the project, explains the elected official, a person strolling in a pleasant provincial town center walks at a maximum of 3 km / h.

In Evry, the average speed of a pedestrian is 5-6 km / h.

"The sauce does not take", notes the architect Xavier Lauzeral, who is working on the rehabilitation of the center of Evry, "the exchanges which were imagined between the various commercial and urban functions did not occur".

On site, traders are not all informed of the work in progress, which should start in a few years, but understand its usefulness. "It's not very lively as a center, apart from banks and restaurants, there are no shops. We only have office customers but it would be good to be able to diversify," says Sandrine. Chareunphol, who runs a restaurant there.

For Xavier Lauzeral, it is necessary "to go back to the foundations and the initial conception of the city" and above all to wait for the inhabitants to appropriate their new center. The new towns know that Rome was not built in a day.