- The French SCOT, a good Tool to restrain urban Sprawl?    click here to open paper content1191 kb
by    Petetit, Sylvain & Jean-Francois, Guet | sylvain.petitet@developpement-durable.gouv.fr   click here to send an email to the auther(s) of this paper
Short Outline
Since 2000 France has developped a kind of strategic planning especially to restrain urban sprawl. Today we have about 300 SCOT projects (schéma de cohérence territorial) and 40 approved documents. Will they succeed in restraining this sprawl?
Abstract
In France the urban sprawl is widely linked to the price of real estate in city centers, the liking of french people for single family dwelling, the important development of infrastructures (especially roads) with poor links with territorial planning and the scattering of local authorities.
Each mayor is proud and jealous of his power to organize the urban developement of his local community and, especially, in small peri-urban towns often preferes a badly controlled urban development in his own space than a developement somewhere else . Thus in spite of a real willingness to restrain urban sprawl and to organize a really sustainable development of its territory , France did not succeed in restraining this sprawl and to really protect its landscapes and its peri-urban natural or agricultural spaces until now.
After different laws in the 90’s devoted to the reorganization of local power promoting the so-called “intercommunalité de projet”, the SRU law (Solidarity and Urban Renewal) in 2000 proposed a new tool for strategic planning. This law introduced three major inovations. The first one is the freedom given to the local authorites for the definition of the space for the conception and the implementation of this strategic plan. The second one is the obligation of the definition of a shared sustainable developping project (PADD: Projet d’aménagement et de développement durable) for the space involved. The third one is the building of a special public establishment gathering the local authorities involved and devoted to the conception and the implementation of the strategic plan. Today we have arround 300 SCOT spaces and 30 officialy approved plans but the point is: can we say it will be an efficient tool to restrain urban sprawl ?
Keywords
strategic planning, urban sprawl
Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2008: Urban Growth without Sprawl
click here to open paper content  Click to open the full paper as pdf document
click here to send an email to the auther(s) of this paper  Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper