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RESEARCH PRODUCT

L’habitat durable sans l’habiter ? Fabrique de la densité en Bourgogne

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In 2009 and 2010, in order to combat the urban sprawl, the Grenelle Environment sets out urban density as a public policy issue. This notion builds on a modus operandi of an urbanization regime that includes both the environmental and the participatory dimensions in its approach. This injunction of sustainability is there implemented through a range of standards, rules and procedures, while the stakeholders in urbanism strive to arrange the experience of inhabiting. But how does this apparatus take the test of reality into account? Based on a qualitative research carried out from 2012 to 2015 on urban planning projects intended to increase density in urban and suburban areas in Burgundy, this article shows how difficult it is for public action to distant itself from a « conception-oriented » urbanization regime. By technifying the issue of sustainability, the urban planning professionals maintain a « schism of reality », because they have a very short-sighted approach of the tangible world of territorialities. Decisions are taken from above, in order to lift constraints on a higher density; those solutions have difficulties to grant the deployment of inhabitants usages. Attempting to bring about an urbanization regime of usages means going beyond a strictly technocratic logic that cognitively confiscates the space making, and exploring new ways of investigation enabling public action to embrace what inhabiting is made of.