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Dating from the 1960s, an emblematic tower in the working-class district of Caucriauville, west of the port of Seine-Maritime, is about to benefit from a total “regeneration”.
Renovation, energy saving, ecology… On the occasion of the international consultation “Neighborhoods of tomorrow” aimed at improving the living environment of the inhabitants of ten pilot territories, a look back at some projects designed as experimental laboratories.
We only see her for miles around. A 16-story tower, housing 126 T3 and T4 apartments, topped with a reservoir holding tens of thousands of tons of water and planted in the middle of the Caucriauville plain. To the west of Le Havre (Seine-Maritime), this dormitory town was built out of nothing in the 1960s to house people left homeless by Allied bombings, but also returnees from colonized territories and workers at the Renault Sandouville factory, inaugurated in 1964. For the moment, hard to imagine that, in a few years, the Reservoir tower will be a model of housing for the future!
“When the water tower was first filled, the building sank 75 centimeters,” says Jérôme Jacq, director of strategy and offers at Logeo Seine, the Normandy social landlord. By visiting the tower with its balconies squatted by pigeons and the apartments emptied of their inhabitants (only five families chose to stay, the others were rehoused temporarily or permanently according to their choice), he goes back in time. “However, when the first inhabitants arrived, it was revolutionary: underfloor heating, integrated
