Speakers
Description
The Grand Paris Express (GPE) is an extension of the Parisian underground rail network. For its proponents, it is both a transportation and an urban development project, in support of the restructuring of Parisian peripheries around the future stations. GPE amounts to 200 km of new railways, 68 new stations and an estimated cost of 44 billion Euros. Société des Grands Projets (SGP) is the state agency in charge of overseeing the design and implementation of the project, as well as contributing to metropolitan restructuring through urban development projects on the land purchased for network implementation.
The scale of the network and its prerogatives make SGP an important market actor in the Paris region. For the new metro, SGP is purchasing approximately 2000 plots of land on the surface (about 170 hectares) through mutual agreement, expropriation, or temporary occupation. These land acquisitions serve the construction of the transport project, but part of the land will be developed to contribute to network financing and to regional housing needs. Thus, in a context where the sale and redevelopment of public land are increasingly being used to finance urban policies and infrastructure (Artioli, 2021), SGP develops real estate projects on its land through agreements with the main developers of the Paris region. SGP started out by selling building rights, and is now concluding joint-ventures with private developers using a new company (SGP Immobilier) to maximise land-value capture (Aveline et Maulat, 2024). Around 80 real estate projects are planned on the land acquired by the SGP for the metro, contributing to neighbourhood transformation around the future metro stations.
Despite the growing commodification of properties and encroachment of market logics in SGP’s action, the agency is by no means a ‘regular’ landowner or real estate developer. As other public landowners (Piganiol, 2017; Adisson, 2018), it must strike a balance between rent maximization and objectives pertaining to public interest, including the provision of affordable housing, buildings’ environmental performance and the provision of urban amenities (Delepine et al., forthcoming).
To achieve such objectives of exemplarity, SGP must coordinate the action of several public and private actors and actively manoeuver for policy change. To do so, the agency combines financial and technical assistance, ad hoc coordination entities and the production of numerous guides and charters defining best practice in different domains (Schorung, 2021; Fleury & Gomes, 2024), including real estate. Our presentation analyses the “social and environmental reference guide for SGP’s urban and real estate projects” (SGP, 2022), a compilation of design principles and operational guidelines. The guide is intended to frame the action of private developers and architects and can be compared to other tools implemented by local government to regulate private real estate development (such as chartes promoteurs). The guide thus functions as both a regulatory and design instrument. Its analysis contributes to larger debates on market regulation and local policy instruments to address environmental challenges and the production of affordable housing in major metropolitan areas.
Our hypothesis is that the use of the guide in practice shows the contingent reassessment of social and environmental objectives in face of rent maximization imperatives, which translate into diverse uses of the document. The guide is purposefully written as a vague “rulebook” in order to not overdetermine how the game is played, allowing for individual processes to unfold. SGP’s use of the guide would then be particularly instrumental, exploring its potential when it allows to turn power dynamics in its favour.
This presentation is based on empirical work in different real estate projects of the SGP, including semi-structured interviews with project stakeholders and desk research.
References
Adisson Felix (2018) From state restructuring to urban restructuring: the intermediation of public landownership in urban development projects in France European Urban Regional Studies 25 (4), 373–390.
Artioli Francesca (2021) Sale of Public Land as a Financing Instrument. The Unspoken Political Choices and Distributional Effects of Land-Based Solutions Land Use Policy 104,
Delépine Inès, Maulat Juliette and Pedro Mathilde (2024) Le Grand Paris aménagé par les opérateurs de transport : approche croisée des stratégies immobilières de la RATP et de la Société du Grand Paris (conference presentation)
Fleury Antoine and Gomes Pedro (2024) Public space and the metropolis. The changing governance of public spaces around the Grand Paris Express’s new metro stations, Urban Geography, 45(1), pp. 93–113.
Piganiol Marie (2017) Le prix du compromis politique Revue francaise de sociologie 58, no 2 (29 juin 2017): 267‑93.
Schorung Matthieu (2021) L’aménagement des gares du Grand Paris Express face à la gouvernance complexe de la région-capitale. L’instrument du comité de pôle comme réponse pour une meilleure coordination des acteurs ? espacepolitique. https://doi.org/10.4000/espacepolitique.9214
SGP (2022) Référentiel environnemental et sociétale des projets immobiliers et urbains de la Société du Grand Paris. URL: pm_12814_168_168383-hx0v6xt10y.pdf
| Keywords | public land; real estate; design guides; regulation; Grand Paris Express; |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
