With them came the employees need to stay

Val-de-Reuil is not very known. It is to him. The Mayor of the commune of the Eure, Marc-Antoine Jamet, is also the Secretary General of the LVMH group, and if this function he steals some of his time of elected, it also serves it to promote a new city known especially its inhabitants and 1970s urbanism buffs. In a few years, he managed to persuade forty architects to participate in the urban renewal of this great city of 15,000 people. Parisians Jean-Michel Wilmotte, Architecture Studio, Jean-Jacques Ory, more familiar of world-renowned projects, agreed to place the market or nursery school sites, attracting other big names, including business leaders who have perhaps not thought about this plain in the West, about 100 kilometres from Paris.

With them came the employees need to stay. Several private developers have taken the path of the Normandy. 20 Units were barely produced each year since 1990, Constructa group, in association with Morgan Stanley Bank branded Propria, must launch a first tranche of 130 small collectives; 4 M, renamed Akeris, sold in a few weeks a building of 110 housing to investors, and sucker would now file a building permit for a first tranche of 400 apartments.

Since the success of Bilbao and the international will that Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum has brought, the mayors build many architecture to restore luster and appeal to their city. A large Museum is often the anchor of a vast town planning operation, as in Lyon, where the urban sculpture of Coop Himmelblau gave the symbolic kickoff of the redevelopment of the South of the peninsula. The "small" Beaubourg in the signed Metz Jean de Gastines and Shigeru Ban has become the logo image of the new district of the Arsenal, and the city soon. "But should not be deluding themselves, an urban project spans ten or fifteen years. Real estate and urban planning interest first professionals, then, the inhabitants, believes Patrice Vergriete, the Director of the Agency of urban planning of Dunkirk. But a cultural or sports event is much more in terms of image that the renovation of a downtown.

Lille is the best example: European capital of culture in 2004, she received international media coverage (more than 2,600 articles in the foreign press) who transformed the grey city of Flanders in a modern and attractive city ideally placed between Paris, Brussels and London. The effects of this flattering reputation are not made to wait: the most direct is the increase in prices of real estate, very concretely correlated to an image perpetuated by a subtle game of mirrors between the municipality always prompt to action, its people more in more proud to live a recognized metropolis and the media often attempted to extend to a whole city a detected on a neighbourhood trend.

The leverage of public funds

In the absence of this type of opportunity, massive public investments made over the last twenty years to improve transportation, the carts, recharacterize whole areas or reclaim industrial wasteland were able to change the image of some cities. More effective than the qualitative slogans such as "the surdouée", or "the crossroads of Europe", the arrival of a TGV or the implantation of a tramway have the double effect of modernizing the landscape and closer to symbolically and transport time of until then eccentric to inner city neighbourhoods. The result is immediate, even anticipated by private owners who suddenly see their valued heritage: increase in land prices, those of the real estate and more slowly, sociological change of the population.

The Oregonian observed and denounced by the notaries effect, which pushes the poorer classes more and more away from the centres, transportation and more generally the most expensive addresses is verified in most of the towns of France and further accentuated as a perverse policy. Saint-Etienne in is not yet. Its beautiful buildings in the downtown area are still too dilapidated to attract the smaller private investor. Mayor Michel Thiollière, which helps their rehabilitation through public grants, see the day where a Stéphanois will be replaced by candidates from and more affluent property. Its policy of urban modernization could lead to the paradoxical situation.

Elected officials like to compare the city to the capital of the Spanish basque country. Same rich past industrial, economic stagnation, even urban collapse and an economic revival based on the development of major cultural facilities: the city of design, exhibition and research centre located in a spectacular building designed by end turned, has already been published everywhere. Zenith will be designed by the architect Norman Foster... Manuelle Gautran signs an office building, Massimiliano Fuksas is working on the neighbourhood of the railway station... The facelift is underway, and it has the objective to attract capital and new, from populations of Lyon or further still.

Sluggish for many years, La Seyne-sur-Mer woke. This is another type of site, rich of a front single sea and enough space to achieve one of the last ports of the Mediterranean on a military land remained fallow for years. In just two years, the Town Hall has issued 1,300 built, including the three quarters for single downtown, bordered of a wasteland of 40 hectares razed in the early 1990 and empty of any investment private since. He has had several attempts and as many failures to achieve an urban project, designed by the Agency Group Six, form today with a park of 4.5 hectares already open and the first tranche of door Marines, 221 housing which will be 500 in 2009. Are also planned a hotel, a conference centre, a theatre and a harbour of 600 rings.

Public-private partnership

Accused by his opposition to sell off public lands and heritage of the city, the Mayor, Arthur Paecht, backs his decisions to a system of public-private partnership to finance major projects, by selling the land, without increasing taxes. "I do not brade land." On the contrary, I sell very expensive... I'm quite happy to see that big promotion groups interested in La Seyne. "There are four or five years, they were rare to dare is risking a euro", he says. Since they are all there and have driven up the prices of new homes up to smics euros per square metre, rate still lower than those of Commons adjacent, but too high for the inhabitants of La Seyne.

A puppet, in the Seine-Saint-Denis, the Mayor, Bertrand Kern, arrived in 2001 did not need this public seed. Its city, the last of the small Crown in the process of service economy, benefits from its location at the gates of Paris and at the foot of the Metro. In 2007, more than 3,000 employees group BNP Paribas invest great Mills transformed into offices, and several companies such as Hermès and Fabio Lucci chose to double their surfaces of workshops and offices. Delighted of this development, the Mayor provides the redevelopment of downtown and the re-qualification of the canal of the Ourq in a mixed area of habitat, shops and activities.

Aware of the slow but inevitable changes, it intends to control them: "I wish that Pantin welcomes everyone: youth, with Parisians, families, but I will do all that these newcomers do not hunt people of today.". "The Pantinois must be able to stay in their city, to find housing and not in housing necessarily", he says. The increase has yet reached 25 in 2005 and prices have more than doubled since 1998, in seven years of the equivalent in francs of 1.096 euros per square metre to over 2,600 in late 2005.

To combat this flight risk ruining his dream of co-education, the Mayor has not hesitated to use authoritarian arguments: the urban right of first refusal gives priority to purchase all goods placed on the market beyond a deadline it has set at 4,000 euros per square metre. Another method, the requirement that developers not to sell their new apartments more than 3,000 euros per square metre, to integrate 20 of housing in all operations of more than 2.000 m2 and book the inside scoop of sales to the inhabitants of the commune. Nothing easier, even if the approach is not legally bounded: introducing programs to sell first in the city newspaper, the city is sure to reach its target. At the time where the building is officially placed on the market, 80 of bookings are already made.

The Toolbox of the elect is hardly provided to combat the excesses of the market, and all the mayors do also not want to go this route. Diversity protected or sought but now part of the image of the ideal city. A dream that the euphoria that real estate makes increasingly Utopian.