Tra creazione architettonica, nuovi vandalismi e salvaguardia dei tessuti storici urbani: il caso francese

Strongly supported by the Minister for Territorial Cohesion, Jacques Mézard, the law on changes in housing, land management and digital technology (loi ELAN), definitively adopted by the French Senate on 16 October 2018 after a long legislative process during which the text grew exponentially (from 65 to 234 articles), arouses considerable concern in architects and conservation experts. Among other risky points, this tool, based on criteria of simplification of the urban code, weakens the role of the architects des bâtiments de France (ABF) – body of 180 specialist planning officials based in each préfecture –, whose consent is required for any planning application concerning protected buildings or within conservation areas (building permit, demolition permit, installation of power lines, etc.). As part of the monitoring of protected areas and the landscape, their indispensable ‘compliant opinions’ have been transformed into ‘simple opinions’ and therefore reduced to non-mandatory indications about the interventions to be implemented on threatening constructions. In ruin or at risk, subject to danger or affected by projects of the National Agency for Housing (ANAH). Characterized by a purely quantitative and functionalist approach to architecture, regardless of its beauty or its good urban and landscape integration, this law seems to operate for the first time a real inversion of trend in the policies of protection at the urban scale that France carries on – although with some conceptual limitations and as many operational difficulties – for almost sixty years, re-proposing conceptions that had been typical of the period of the economic boom and whose negative results are still impressed in its cities.