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Stop

Let’s face reality. Today, in 2026, building has become an act of resistance.
And finding a comfortable home, a feat.

Soaring costs. A maze of standards. Dwindling land supply. Ever more stifling buildability rules… The general temptation is to give up: to give up on studies, on a job. And sometimes even on starting a family.

Let’s say it: our urbanism is running out of breath.

The housing crisis? A crisis of building rights, shrunk to almost nothing: ridiculous ground-coverage limits, excessive setbacks from plot boundaries, absurd unsealed-ground ratios. The housing shortage is glaring, yet buildable square metres have become impossible to find. Queues grow longer for the slightest rental offer in big cities. And yet every extension, every upward extension, the slightest degree of freedom to build more and welcome better has to be begged for.

The default rule is a ban on building, a ban on welcoming people where everyone would nonetheless like to be able to live. Like arsonist firefighters, we organise the shortage. And then we point the finger. At speculation. At Airbnb. At second-home owners.

The property crisis? A crisis of planning. The kind that asks everyone to go and find a home elsewhere: the places here are taken, we are full! Quite simply, a crisis of acceptance of new construction by neighbours.

Those who already have a home, the “well housed”, no longer want anything built next door to house those who are arriving.

Young people, students, entrepreneurs, working people and families struggle to find their place in the sun: close to jobs, nature, public facilities, shops and metro stations.

Move along, we are told. And we are asked to look further afield.

Once more

So we go further afield. And that is how urban sprawl still has a bright future ahead of it. And with it,

✼ social exclusion and injustice – through housing prices;

✼ the degradation of biodiversity – through the land take of new natural and agricultural land;

✼ rising greenhouse gas emissions – through more kilometres driven by car;

✼ and ultimately, the acceleration of a climate change that hardly needed the help.

Our businesses, our factories and our poultry farms suffer the same fate: not here! Meaning, further away?

Yes, elsewhere. And this at a time when reindustrialisation and sovereignty — national as well as European — are on everyone’s lips…

Let’s be clear-sighted. This crisis of acceptance of “construction next door” is largely the result of our collective failure. Urban planners, architects, builders of the living environment: what we plan, what we announce, what we build makes nobody dream.

Yes, we make nobody dream. It has been a very long time since our projects promised a brighter tomorrow.

Stop

Our building permits, our site hoardings, our cranes do not herald the long-awaited homes. They do not herald the public facilities, the transport or the improvements to the living environment people have been hoping for. They do not herald something better. But something worse.

Neighbours — and, increasingly, society as a whole — prefer the status quo to our promises. They prefer to resign themselves to today’s everyday difficulties, however cruel, rather than sign up to our “solutions”.

Urban planners have even ended up falling for the fad they themselves created: “the stationary city”.

The city that neither grows nor shrinks.
The city that freezes, on some unknown date.
The city where, at last, immobility passes for tranquillity.

But the stationary city is a frozen city. A dead one.

Once more

In reality, it is the frozen city, the stationary city, that produced the urban sprawl of the last 5 decades: rather than building where the city already existed, we left it as it was and moved a little further away.

Thus, three quarters of the urbanised land in France was urbanised after 1945. It has only 20, and more often 15, 10 or even 5 homes per hectare. Densities far too low to give access on foot to a bakery, a school or a shop. But a density that offers an abundance of possibilities to keep on building.

So there is an abundance of possibilities to build, almost everywhere in France. An abundance of room, if only by moving from these very low densities to a modest density of 25 homes per hectare.

25 homes per hectare: that is the average density of the town of Vannes, in Brittany, a little paradise on earth at the heart of the Gulf of Morbihan, whose charms leave no one indifferent.

Did you say abundance?

No!

Neighbours will tell you that despite this abundance, all the places are taken.
And architects, urban planners and land developers will go on to explain learnedly that the party is over, that abundance is a thing of the past and that the time has come for the politics of scarcity, for voluntary frugality (for others, of course).

Stop

Some areas are losing population and regret it. Others, on the contrary, are welcoming newcomers but no longer wish to welcome any more.

We are facing a crisis of spatial planning. A deep crisis of our urbanism. A crisis that has some of its roots in an equally structural crisis of our architecture.

Here is how we will not get out of it:

✼ Let’s keep ignoring the disaffection the general public feels for our new neighbourhoods. Let’s keep considering beauty a matter of taste, on which the general public has no say. Let’s keep snubbing the French people’s aspiration for a beauty that is living and popular;

✼ Let’s pursue our post-Covid equivocations, which end up destroying the scientific consensus on the social and environmental virtues of urban density. And let’s give in to the siren calls of degrowth (for others), of de-metropolisation (for others, of course) and of the return to the countryside and the vegetable patch (always for others…);

✼ Let’s never stop harping on, all day long, about the word “sufficiency” — when the drastic, ongoing reduction of building possibilities in local planning regulations (PLU) is the primary cause of the housing shortage. And therefore of soaring prices;

✼ Insidiously, and by degrees, let’s use this entirely manufactured shortage to call into question one of the cornerstones of our democracies: private property — that is, the possibility for everyone to enjoy a space of their own, with no constraint other than their neighbour’s freedom and the framework set by the general interest. Let’s keep preferring full ownership for ourselves while suggesting degraded versions of it for others.

It is time to challenge our postures, our hypocrisies and our collective beliefs. It is time to offer others what we wish for ourselves.

Fight

Constant alerts about the ecological and social emergency saturate people’s minds. Labels, standards and certificates of good conduct stifle, exhaust and weary. The moral lectures delivered to the population all day long breed disgust. But also despair.

Our young people hesitate to bite into life: and some of them sink into lethargy. The prospect of merely surviving economically, of being unable to change the game or to pursue a personal dream, is discouraging. To the point where committing to, and projecting oneself into, a long-term career no longer makes sense.

At Villes Vivantes, we have chosen to go on the offensive.

Our project?
To transform the administrative, emasculating and inept urbanism we see every day into a positive urbanism. A combative one. And a liberating one.

To each their own desires.
To each their own freedom.

Our mission?
To build a generous France.
To deploy an ecology of hospitality and abundance.
To create an urbanism that allows everyone to live where they wish to live. In a home and an environment that match their desires.
To invent a profession of architect and urban planner that is the lever of this new abundance.

Working at Villes Vivantes

At Villes Vivantes, we have made a simple choice: we are not a company that rests in comfort.

We prototype new services and new professions, and we are paving the way for another way of making the city with its residents. And we are paid on results.

We work on real, technical, difficult projects, with elected officials, residents and local authority departments, within ever tighter budgetary and regulatory constraints.

No one else in France, or even elsewhere, currently practises the professions we practise or runs the processes we run. Every day, we are engaged in an R&D process that began more than twelve years ago. It demands ambition, discipline, rigour and a taste for intensive learning, as a team.

We are looking for solid people with a deep-rooted service mindset. Professionals who like strong cultures, clear rules and coming to grips with reality.

True kindness, for us, means telling each other:

– here are our challenges,
– here is how much effort is required,
– here is the ambition we are pursuing,

And then doing everything we can to achieve our goals, serve local authorities and residents, and learn as we go.