At the edge of the immense Thau pond (Hérault), two cabins where families came to spend their holidays were destroyed this year. This informal housing, illegally developed in natural or agricultural areas, has proliferated so much that it is now in the crosshairs of the authorities. In this case, from the community of Sète Agglopôle Méditerranée, which was responsible for removing the two sheds and any trace of the passage of vacationers.
“The objective is to restore the places to their original appearance, and to make them inaccessible”points Sandrine Lafont, natural and agricultural spaces project manager of the urban community, happy to see “nature's extraordinary capacity for resilience: we remove everything in autumn and in spring, it's as if the plot had never been built on”she admires.
The renaturation operation is part of an agreement with the Conservatoire du Littoral, a public structure which ensures the preservation of coastal areas. Previously, the structure had acquired the land. The desire to preserve these fragile wetlands, with their precious biodiversity, is combined with that of protecting the population from marine submersion and flooding.
Very often, what was originally a simple shelter in a natural area or a tool shed on agricultural land is transformed without authorization into a second home or permanent housing with a solid building, awning, etc., without connection to the network. sanitation. With diverse motivations: some build over the years a house with a swimming pool in a dream landscape; others cannot afford housing and first set up a caravan before putting together a makeshift home. And, more rarely, store equipment related to their professional activity there.
This phenomenon has taken on an unprecedented scale, from Gard to the Pyrénées-Orientales. “It’s a form of peri-urbanization around dense areas like Montpellier or Sète”explains Cédric Bohun, from the Languedoc-Roussillon shore delegation of the Conservatoire du littoral. In Hérault, around 30,000 plots are “cabanized” on the coast and even in the hinterland, according to the departmental directorate of territories and the sea (DDTM). It spotted them three years ago thanks to its artificial intelligence cartographic software, Aigle, able to compare aerial photos over three different periods.
Risk areas
It appears that a fifth of illegally inhabited plots are located in major risk areas, threatened by forest fires or floods. Above all, these illicit occupations are accused of polluting and degrading natural environments, diverting agricultural land for housing purposes and contributing to the increase in land prices, preventing the establishment of young farmers.
Most of the monitoring rests on the municipalities, which carry out land monitoring and, with subsidies from the Coastal Conservatory or the water agency, seek to acquire the natural spaces to be protected and to ensure that the land agriculture goes to farmers. But, for three years, the Hérault prefecture has been helping them and increasing large-scale checks. Municipal services and law enforcement are mobilized to draw up reports and report offenses to the courts.
These illicit occupations are accused of polluting, degrading natural environments and diverting agricultural land for housing purposes.
In the event of construction without authorization, the challenge is to intervene before the statute of limitations, six years in criminal cases and ten years in civil cases, by obtaining the departure of the occupants, threatened with administrative fines or legal proceedings. However, the repression comes up against the social question: it happens that households in precarious situations, invisible victims of the housing shortage, are insolvent and have to be rehoused.
Social question
Many other territories are in the crosshairs. According to the Terre de Liens federation, which remobilizes land for agriculture, illegal housing is for example visible in Ardèche. “During a diagnosis of agricultural wastelands for the community of communes of Aubenas, most of those that we identified were affected by cabanization”notes Hélène Béchet, territories and communities coordinator of the federation.
In Île-de-France too, the illegal occupation of natural and agricultural spaces is in the sights of the land development and rural settlement company. She is more broadly concerned about “mitage”which also includes illegal clearing and illegal dumping of waste.
But for local authorities, on the front line, “the subject is very thorny and political”notes Hélène Béchet. Especially since many of them continue to concrete their territory with road infrastructures, new neighborhoods, or sports and leisure facilities, even more destructive than cabanization.
