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.
He had always known the Minor Seminary. It is in this district in the north-east of Marseille, located at the bottom of a valley, that Guy Lucchesi has all his childhood memories. He shows a cypress tree, next to which he came to drink water from the spring: a country house stood there, which “depended on the major seminary of Saint-Joseph“. Then, a few steps away, he reveals his «bijou»a patch of greenery where thick grass grows, between large collective housing residences, with a view of the hill massif in the distance. “It’s a remaining part of the Arnoux countryside, which was a land of adventure for the kids like us, until they built the Bougainvilleas”he says again. For a long time, Guy Lucchesi feared finding in this place the real estate projects which were eating away at the rest of the territory: these days, four cranes are tearing up the landscape below.
At the head of the Beaumont-Plateau neighborhood interest committee, he fought to limit the height of any buildings to 16 meters in this building zone. But that was before she joined the green casting project. The Petit Séminaire is in fact one of the ten priority districts of the city selected for the international consultation “Quartiers 2030” intended to imagine the “neighborhoods of tomorrow”. The Marseille project stands out for its landscaped entrance: a green network of more than two hectares running along Rue de la Maurelle. A space far from being trivial as this street has written a part of the history of social housing in Marseille.
At the end of the 1950s, the Petit Séminaire city was built there to absorb some of the post-war slums. Not a large bar but four small buildings, including 240 housing units, with basic layouts, quickly requiring initial rehabilitation. From 1976 to 1986, the operation was already carried out in a completely innovative framework: project management was entrusted to a team bringing together architects, sociologists and photographers, who played the role of mediators between the inhabitants and the HLM office. “People defined what they wantedif he raps Guy Lucchesi. There was a large agora, where families of all nationalities, of all faiths could come together, with a large gypsy community. Every June 24, there was the biggest Saint-Jean fire in Marseille. It was bohemian life.”
These memories make Guy Lucchesi all the more severe on the chronicle of poor housing that then began. From the 1990s, the buildings and outdoor spaces deteriorated, reaching a point of no return: the city was destroyed between 2020 and January 2024. “The Petit Séminaire alone represents national dishonor in terms of management of social housing, it is more than forty years of neglect, of total abandonment”he denounces. So, rejoicing that the “green trumps concrete” and may soon be created “a garden for little ones who have nothing”today he salutes both the project and the method: “It’s really focused on the landscape, not town planning, it will calm the whole neighborhood, give it some oxygen.”
“It’s very difficult not to agree when we approach the renovation project via green”agrees Bélaid Aroun, director of the Maison pour tous La Maurelle, who also relays the “high expectations for housing” of the 1,500 inhabitants of the priority district. With other local residents, he is counting on a ripple effect from this new green flow for a “qualitative rehabilitation” of the entire area. Because the destruction of the Petit Séminaire city highlighted the urgent renovation of the neighboring buildings of Les Ruches. This is on the program, as is the construction of new social housing and others for home ownership, “open to the landscape and rue de la Maurelle”, he specifies.
For now, residents still see carcasses of fridges, broken sofas and all the rubbish that litters the slope between the pines and other Mediterranean species. But the landscape qualities of the area did not escape the teams who came at the end of November to visit the place before submitting their application for the competition. The start of construction is planned for 2027, in the meantime, the project must be built with the residents. Ideas are already emerging: a sports course, an intergenerational place, spaces “to settle down after school”… “If we respect the word of the inhabitants, this can only succeedassures Bélaid Aroun. We can do something magnificent on the little hill.”
Building with residents
Can we repair democracy from housing, from the neighborhood? Since 2014, the question of resident participation in priority neighborhoods of city policy (QPV) has been resolved by law: citizen councils, which aim to involve residents in decisions, are mandatory. But from theory to practice, there is often a big gap. “It’s difficult to mobilize residents,” says an elected official. “We have already been contacted and the participants were very disappointed with the results given, to put it politely,” regrets a social actor. Marie-Hélène Bacqué, sociologist and urban planner, confirms this: if participatory approaches are essential in speeches, in reality they are often reduced to simple information, or even communication. In most of the operations of the National Agency for Urban Renewal (Anru), demolition has already taken place when residents are consulted. But counterexamples exist. Thus the renovation of a series of HLM pavilions scheduled for destruction in Boulogne-sur-Mer (Pas-de-Calais), emblematic of the “architectural permanence” that the town planner and architect Sophie Ricard has been defending for more than ten years. . Finding suitable solutions cannot be done without residents: “We need citizen reappropriation!”
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