ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE
(1) Teaming up with the house
A fresh start
At Villes Vivantes, we firmly believe:
✼ that, over the course of its history, the house has already taken a thousand forms that cannot be reduced to those we knew in the 20th century;
✼ that it is today the fundamental atom of the “organic urbanism” we are rolling out in order to plan and develop France better.
If residents are to contribute concretely to the shaping of places, it must necessarily be through an object over which they can exercise a legitimate form of power, an object “of their own”. The power to decide, the power to act, to adapt, to transform what belongs to you.
That object, then, is “home”: a plot, a house, a garden, a space they will arrange, fit out, plant, build, reconfigure, according to their needs, their aspirations, their means and their way of life. One step after another, drawing on the skills of various professionals.
In our view, then, “organic architecture” is not an architecture that artificially mimics the curved or more or less random forms of living things. Nor is it a work built over a waterfall, or in the middle of a forest.
It is, more fundamentally, the process by which, thanks to a new distribution channel for architectural services, anyone becomes able, step by step, to shape their own living space so as to improve their own comfort, that of their loved ones and the built environment in which they live.
Organic architecture is what makes the bespoke, the personalised and the well-designed accessible to all, at every stage of life.
The house: dreamed of, shunned, declared dead
The French dream of a house. They always have. And their passion shows no sign of fading. Yes, the house is as old as the world.
But its latest incarnation has produced rather repetitive forms across our land, and above all: all the urban sprawl of the 20th century. It was our housing developments that housed families, workers and the employees of France’s flagship companies at an affordable price. All this came at a cost: these same housing developments gradually ate into our natural and agricultural land, making our landscapes bland.
Architects and urban planners, for their part, shun the house:
✼ only 5% of houses today are designed by an architect (using an architect is compulsory from 150 m² of floor area…);
✼ and you will never see an urban planner, or a landscape architect, include a housing development among the selected pieces in their portfolio.
It is as if, over the past 70 years, French families and spatial planning professionals had lived in two separate worlds. Several housing ministers (pushed by their administrations) did not hesitate to announce to the French, quite simply, the death of the house: its end, its foretold disappearance, its supposedly inevitable obsolescence… While continuing, of course, to live in a house themselves…
... then brought back to life!
Many people have, in fact, confused
✼ no net land take, the objective set by the 2021 Climate and Resilience Act, which means the end of housing developments on the urban fringe as we have known them, which is rather a good thing for our landscapes and for biodiversity, but also for our daily commuting times and for reducing our carbon emissions;
✼ with the end of the “house” itself: the idea that a family can live in a space of its own and enjoy a garden, a space that it can simply decide to extend or adjust according to its needs and its dreams.
Those who condemned the house because urban sprawl must stop have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Some out of ignorance, others perhaps because they never really liked the idea of a popular house, accessible to all French people, and the ways of life it makes possible.
At Villes Vivantes, we believe that the house has a fundamental role to play in the country’s future.
Our BIMBY, BUNTI and BAMBA programmes prove it every day: if we want to house the French where they need or wish to live, at an affordable price, with a garden for those who want one, by densifying what already exists, without resorting to an economic model that would ruin public finances, we can and must team up with the house.
Here is how, in 7 points:
- Teaming up with the family
- Teaming up with 15 million neighbours
- Teaming up with the resident as project owner
- Teaming up with the short housing supply chain
- Teaming up with the village
- Teaming up with the home
- Teaming up with the French dream
1. Teaming up with the family
Deciding to team up with the house means, first of all, deciding to team up with the “family”, in the classic sense of the term but also, more specifically, in the sense of what Insee (the French national statistics office) calls a “household”: a group of people, sometimes just one, sharing the same roof.
This household, this “family”, is the small circle that makes it possible to decide, fairly simply, to renovate, insulate, install air conditioning, extend, build an upward extension, reconfigure, subdivide, plant and garden, as needs arise, in stages, in response to personal and family events, and even to climate change.
The family is the unit of “distributed” (non-centralised) governance that makes possible:
✼ “organic urbanism”: deciding to move out, move in, have a house built, renovate, divide… and thus contribute to the incremental shaping of places;
✼ but also, on a finer scale, “organic architecture”: deciding to plant, garden, extend, build upwards, fit out, subdivide, rent out, air-condition, decorate… in other words, all those micro-actions that give each person’s home its shape and the way it works.
Owning its house, and more agile architecturally, the family is freer:
✼ When a new little one arrives, the family will be able to extend and add an extra bedroom.
✼ When Madame goes self-employed, the family will be able to extend and create a comfortable space for working from home.
✼ When Grandma gets older, the family will be able to build her a small single-level home in the garden, rather than sending her to a care home.
✼ When Monsieur decides to slow down after the children have left, he will be able to plant, garden, take up growing vegetables, and supply the whole family with tomatoes and jam.
The owner-occupied house is the archetype of the adaptable housing we need in this period of great upheaval: sociological (ageing, household splitting, the challenge of reviving the birth rate, changes in work and the economy), geographical (the reshaping of growing and shrinking areas) and climatic (warming, droughts, floods, disruption and changing climates).
It is this unit of governance which, free from the complexity of collective decision-making in co-ownership, ensures that the adaptation of our buildings does not become ungovernable but can, on the contrary, spread across the entire stock in a fluid, organic way, matching the needs and means of each of its residents, day by day, with the help of the local authority.
The house, its plot, its garden, and the ownership rights on which they rest, are among the keys to the robustness of places, to their capacity to adapt, to withstand shocks and to respond to events, because they are the material and domestic infrastructure for the proper distribution of responsibilities, of decisions to act, and then of the running of projects.
2. Teaming up with 15 million neighbours
Teaming up with the house then means teaming up with the 15 million households who own the 20 million or so houses in our country today.
These owners, these families, are free:
✼ to invest and build again on their plot, creating new homes through extension, subdivision and/or upward extension,
✼ but also to sell a piece of their garden to another private individual, who will have their own house built there.
By sharing their gardens, and deciding to take on new neighbours, these millions of families are already France’s leading producer of building plots: they hold in their hands a potential, organic abundance of building plots already connected to roads and utilities, an abundance of plots located in already urbanised areas, an abundance of micro-plots of building land that we need in order to bring down the price of land and, in turn, the final cost of housing.
3. Teaming up with the resident as project owner
Teaming up with the house then means teaming up with the most affordable economic model of housing production in France: owner-led development.
Having one’s own house built (the resident is the project owner, rather than a delegated project owner, i.e. a developer) makes it possible not only to design the project as precisely as possible, according to one’s own personal needs, but also to save between €500 and €1,500 per square metre built, i.e. up to €200,000 less for a family house than with the property development model.
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Over the past 50 years, the resident as project owner has produced, through owner-led development, between 30% and 50% of total housing production in France, mainly affordable family housing: 85% of houses in France are built through owner-led development, and 15% as grouped housing schemes, by developers or social landlords.
If no net land take is not to spell the gradual extinction of the affordable owner-led development model, we must join forces with the resident as project owner and create the conditions for them to operate, from now on, through gentle and organic densification rather than urban expansion. That is the whole purpose of the BIMBY and BAMBA programmes developed by Villes Vivantes.
4. Teaming up with the short housing supply chain
Teaming up with the house means, in concrete terms, teaming up with all the players in “the short housing supply chain”: house builders, designer-builders, architects, construction firms and tradespeople, surveyors, estate agents and notaries.
Together, these professionals deploy, all over France, from the highest-pressure areas to the most remote, a miniaturised property industry capable of producing
- bespoke,
- on demand,
- and one unit at a time.
They are the only ones able to work on the millions of micro-plots that are now available in abundance within already built plots.
Unlike the large national operators, these players are overwhelmingly small and medium-sized local businesses, with limited operating radiuses, that carry out a few dozen or a few hundred projects each year.
Across the whole country, they provide the know-how, the skills, the entrepreneurial spirit, the local and organic talent pool that residents’ projects fundamentally need in order to come to fruition.
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5. Teaming up with the village
Teaming up with the house means, at a deeper level, teaming up with the village model: not by imitating the picturesque of the postcard, but by reactivating that incremental, plot-based process which leads, in stages, to morphologies and densities that can be described as “village-like”: eclectic, adaptable and evolving.
Urban forms in which the French, but also residents all over the planet, recognise the identity of each place, as well as that “human scale” to which they aspire in their daily lives.
Today, the world’s largest cities, such as Tokyo (40 million people), Jakarta (35 million), Ho Chi Minh City (14 million) and Hanoi (10 million), are growing very largely through village-style detached houses, mostly built through owner-led development.
While the village form is perfectly suited to our rural areas and our small and medium-sized towns, it is also largely in this way that large French cities will be able to combine economic and industrial power, major facilities, services, soft and low-carbon mobility with an organic supply of affordable and comfortable homes, with gardens, a supply compatible with starting a family. Today, the link between the house, the big city and great national ambitions is, paradoxically, the village.
The house holds the seed of the village, which holds the seed of the city, which holds the seed of a nation’s power.
6. Teaming up with the home
The domestic space of the home, its intimacy and its private character, is sometimes set against the State and its will to power.
This is a mistake: the driving forces on which France depends to revive its economy, to reindustrialise, but also to spread its culture far and wide, need a space of their own, a private space in which to recharge.
Being able to contribute forcefully to the collective project requires a solid personal base. A house in which to raise one’s children, a garden one can plant, arrange, extend: that is one such base.
The millions of French households that can freely enjoy a space of their own, comfortable and private: that is the primary infrastructure of France’s productive power.
7. Teaming up with the French dream
Deciding to team up with the house means, finally, teaming up with everyone’s dream: the dream of freedom, the dream of a garden of one’s own, a vegetable patch, a swimming pool, or quite simply of watching one’s children play through the kitchen window.
Deciding to team up with the house therefore means drawing the whole shaping of places towards pleasure, towards meeting the deepest expectations of each individual.
It is in that direction, we believe, that a viable economic model must be sought — for local authorities, for the French, for operators. A model that raises the standard of every place. A model that extends architectural design to the entire production of the built living environment, and no longer to just a fraction of it.
Let us make sure that every home is designed according to each person’s needs and means, in harmony with each place. That the French art of living continues on its organic path, that it allows us to go on making France shine, and to inspire the whole world as the whole world inspires us.