Municipal and inter-municipal cemeteries are an indispensable public works service for all communes.
Many also contain a great deal of cultural and social heritage reflecting the history of towns and often a plant life heritage well worth enhancing. Cemeteries offer a resource to be preserved which can even render the biodiversity of our territories more dynamic.
Taking recent changes into account creates new obligations; both legal, with the 19th December 2008 Act, and societal (the increase of cremation, new funeral procedures, denominational areas....), and affects local authority managerial methods (gradual disappearance of graves held in perpetuity, reclaiming of concession leases...).
Dealing with the management costs of these public works has been considered in function of the constraints of municipal funding.
Also, the Paris Regional Inter-municipal Funeral Syndicate -SIFUREP- wished to give local authorities forward planning elements on the evolutions of cemeteries and their role in towns, to enable them to be better integrated into urban and sustainable development policies, to improve the quality of their public services when addressing new demands and to adapt managerial methods to the new situation.
A study was therefore entrusted to the Atelier Parisien d'Urbanisme -Apur-.
The first results were presented at a symposium organised on the 19th October 2010 assembling all partners.
The summary of the survey of the management of cemeteries which are members of the SIFUREP, is already available.
