Long-term thinking on how land and real estate is perceived and its evolution in development policies
For a long time evaluated according to the surface areas available in terms of square metres of land needed for construction, real estate is nowadays considered differently. It has become multiple, invisible, shared, circular or even vertical or underground. Confronted by these new notions about property, Apur, in 2018, began reflecting on the future thus facilitating awareness of major changes in urban development trends. Two initial documents illustrate this thinking process:
- a descriptive note outlining this new approach to real estate;
- a previously unpublished cartographic work based on land constraints, using as the preliminary trial territory Grand-Orly Seine Bièvre.
The note shows how today’s changes involve space as much as modes of functioning, how the shift in attitude towards real estate is now spreading to all surfaces of the city (ground, above, below, roofs, walls…) and finally how the process of change is reinventing land plots and programmes with much more exploration of the existing potential, and with previously unthought of changes in space and the Chronotope (time/space) aspect of places.
The cartographic work, the atlas of real estate constraints in the Grand-Orly Seine Bièvre territory, brings to light another aspect, the necessity to see how territories bear the weight of their historical legacy (industrial heritage, accommodation of large infrastructures and urban services…) which renders the viability of projects more complex. Based on acknowledging this, the atlas proposes shifting the urban project established first in available space towards a project that integrates the non potential and spacial limits, thus passing from impossible to possible real estate. This means endeavouring to find a new equilibrium rooted in the challenges of a sustainable city based on the territory’s four crucial issues: natural hazards, constraints linked to infrastructures, constraints linked to the danger of ground pollution, and the division of real estate on the territory.