I love early twentieth-century organic styles and the classical orders too. But I have mixed feelings about using traditional styles in modern-day building. Traditional styles were a natural product of the materials, skills and supply chains of their time, and copying them today risks producing surface without substance. The beauty we associate with historic towns owes as much to their streets, squares and human scale, and that is where I think our attention should be focused.

Post-modernism discredited the revival of historic styles. In developments like those to the south of Place de Catalogne in Paris, or around Place du Millénaire in Montpellier, classical details were tacked on to overbearing facades. They were often comically out of scale with traditional practice and with passing pedestrians. Their failure was one of scale and urban form; the classical motifs only made it more conspicuous.

A traditional town on Paris’s doorstep

So it was with some scepticism that I went to take a look at Le Plessis-Robinson, a suburb 10 kilometres south-west of Paris. Residential development expanded after World War II, resulting in vast arrays of bleak housing blocks. By the late 1980s, major revitalisation was necessary and the town opted for a traditional design approach. The town centre, Cœur de Ville, was redeveloped to a masterplan by François Spoerry. Further south, on the site of the upper half of the town’s 1930s garden city, Xavier Bohl masterplanned Nouvelle Cité-jardins, a 20-hectare residential and mixed-use development that was completed in 2009.

Compared with Parisian suburbs of similar location and development path, Le Plessis-Robinson stands out with a comprehensively redeveloped core in a traditional French style. Not the cut-stone grandeur of Haussmann’s Paris, but the recognisable details of late 19th- to early 20th-century French tradition: rendered walls, an even layout of well-proportioned windows and openings, mansard slate roofs, and traditionally styled balconies, railings and landscaping. It is dense too: Nouvelle Cité-jardins fits about 1,300 homes into those 20 hectares.

I walked from the town hall to the Maison des Arts, via Nouvelle Cité-jardins. The route had all the positive attributes of a traditional town. Well-defined public spaces overlooked by shops and public buildings, primary streets with numerous and varied shops; the scale of buildings matched to a human-scale street pattern. There was a noticeable inter-relationship of buildings: not a copy-paste approach to design, but a deliberate alignment of floor levels and building heights to give coherence along the streets.

Five principles beneath the facades

It would be easy to credit the success of Le Plessis-Robinson’s redevelopment to architectural style. Looking more closely, I think the success rests on five planning principles that a contemporary scheme could follow just as well.

Build on what’s there. The town centre is anchored by a small set of historic buildings around the Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste, beside the town hall. Existing woodland lies to the north and east, the latter connecting with the town hall garden, which in turn leads to the main square.

Landscape planned as carefully as the buildings. Nouvelle Cité-jardins lives up to its name, with greenery so dominant it’s almost a garden with some housing, rather than housing with some green space. When developers maximise apartment numbers, and architects have to balance basic services and parking, green space can feel like leftover space. Here, the landscaped areas feel set out with intent, and their organic forms look as though they grew naturally.

Put cars at the edge and connect the paths. Car use is higher here than in central Paris, but traffic stays at the edge of residential blocks. Underground car parks are typically reached via one-way systems. The narrower streets and paths are for pedestrians and cyclists only; they join up with the main street network, making them practical and safe ways to circulate for day-to-day activities. Windows and entrances overlook every path, so none feels awkward to walk through at night.

Mix uses, keep homes quiet. Retail lines the main streets, with quieter residential areas close by. Residents are largely sheltered from heavy traffic, but still benefit from proximity to shops and services.

Homes for a whole life. There’s a notable variation in apartment sizes and formats. It looks possible for residents to move to a bigger home as their family grows, or downsize later, without leaving the town.

None of these principles depends on a particular style. Vauban in Freiburg, Germany, which I visited in 2021, shows how: a former French military base rebuilt with contemporary architecture. Car parks are kept to the edges, pedestrians and cyclists have priority, buildings are of human scale, and the development appears well managed and home to all generations.

Share

The management behind the look

Buildings and public spaces at Le Plessis-Robinson are very well maintained. There’s no visible sense of division or disparity between privately owned and social housing.

What made this possible is less visible than the facades. Le Plessis-Robinson has been led by the same political team since 1989, which allowed policy continuity. Nouvelle Cité-jardins was delivered by a development company that the town controls, with the departmental housing office. Consistent political direction, land control and steady spending on upkeep were key to the success that’s visible today.

Not everything is solved. The town hasn’t completely escaped the 20th-century car-centric pattern. Cars dominate the main shopping street, Avenue Charles de Gaulle, and the Grand’Place. Public transport helps explain it: the regional rail station sits at the town’s edge, and the T10 tram only arrived in 2023.

Where tradition helps

Some traditional elements do add value. The classical facade of the Maison des Arts has great civic presence opposite the town’s market building. In the residential buildings, vertically proportioned windows, evenly positioned and of modest size, limit glare and overheating. France’s environmental rules for new buildings now test summer comfort, which favours this approach.

Across Avenue Charles de Gaulle, an early-1990s modernist block from Le Plessis-Robinson’s first rebuilding phase makes a telling contrast. It has shops at ground level and generous balconies, but its weathered concrete, heavy horizontal bands and bare walls feel far less attuned to human scale.

Plan first, style later

Le Plessis-Robinson is far more than traditional styles tacked on to developer-led urban design. For anyone developing a new district, the order of priorities is clear. Fix the street network, the block sizes, the place of cars and the role of landscape first. Secure the governance and maintenance budget that will sustain quality of life over time. Then choose the architecture, and choose it with summer comfort and human scale in mind. The town chose tradition, and it works. But while the cornices are the easiest part to copy, the quality of life comes from the underlying planning principles.

Against that backdrop, a note published this month by France’s Council of Economic Analysis (Conseil d’analyse économique, CAE) offers useful insight. The CAE is a panel of academic economists whose members are appointed by the Prime Minister’s office. For the first time since 2014, the full Council has signed a joint economic strategy for France.

The note is organised in two parts. The first covers France’s productive and social model: education, productivity, employment, poverty and the public finances. The second covers resilience to climate, trade and geopolitical shocks.

It makes eight main recommendations, backed by accompanying thematic papers. The proposed reforms would be funded by reallocating existing budgets, so would not worsen the deficit.

French debt in context

France’s GDP was €2,991 billion in 2025, about US$3.38 trillion. Public debt stood at 115.6% of GDP at the end of 2025, below the United States’ 124% but well above Germany’s 63.5% and above the UK’s 102%.

While the US has a higher debt, France has the highest public spending of the four as a percentage of GDP: 57.3% in 2025, against 37.7% in the US. Of the €1,714 billion in public spending in 2025, €771 billion was social benefits, such as pensions, paid to households.

The CAE’s core concern is a structural excess of public expenditure over receipts. Excluding interest and the effects of the economic cycle, France’s deficit stood at 2.1% of GDP in 2026, about €60 billion: even in normal times, spending consistently exceeds revenue.

Its answer is a €125 billion correction in the annual public balance by 2032 with around half delivered in the first two years. That’s equivalent to about 4% of GDP and a little over 7% of public spending.

Reforms for growth

The Council of Economic Analysis note starts with proposals for growth-enhancing reforms. On education, it would reallocate about €4 billion a year, freed up by falling pupil numbers, to raise attainment at the end of lower secondary school (age 14 to 15) by a full year of learning within a decade.

On productivity, it blames France’s divergence from the United States chiefly on slow diffusion of digital technology. Labour productivity grew by 0.8% a year in France between 1995 and 2025, against 1.7% in the US. Generative AI risks repeating the pattern: 28% of French employees use it at work, against 43% in the US.

The Council proposes a France 2040 programme worth €6 billion a year for ten years, extending France 2030, the state’s investment plan for strategic sectors such as decarbonised energy, industry and transport. A separate policy to spread technology among small and mid-sized firms would receive its own budget of €600 million a year.

On employment, the note proposes scaling back the €77 billion a year in general relief on employer social contributions, now concentrated on minimum-wage jobs. The Council proposes directing part of the savings to support employment of young people, older workers and the long-term unemployed. Labour-intensive sectors such as construction would be affected by any change.

From carbon pricing to risk management

From 2028, the EU’s expanded emissions trading system (ETS2) will put a carbon price on fuel for heating buildings and for road transport. The CAE wants it to sit on top of France’s existing carbon tax on fossil fuels (contribution climat-énergie), with a significant share of the roughly €7 billion a year it should raise in France by 2030 returned to vulnerable households as visible cash transfers.

For new construction, the direct effect is limited. France’s building-carbon regulation, RE2020, has already pushed gas heating out of most new homes, and cement and steel are covered by the EU’s original emissions trading scheme. The cost of ETS2 will fall mainly on haulage and on site machinery, as the expanded scheme also covers fuel combustion in the construction industry.

The larger effect of ETS2 is on existing buildings. Higher running costs for gas and oil-heated stock strengthen the case for renovation. (Renovation and maintenance already accounts for 60% of building activity.) The Council also wants better evaluation of renovation subsidies, including MaPrimeRénov’ and the energy savings certificates scheme funded through energy bills. The proposal is for the schemes to be assessed on their cost per tonne of CO₂ avoided.

Climate adaptation is where the CAE note goes furthest with regard to construction. It calls for adaptation to become a pillar of climate policy centred on prevention. The natural disaster insurance scheme (CatNat) is funded by a flat surcharge on property insurance premiums, regardless of risk. The Council would raise it gradually, spend more on prevention for existing buildings, and introduce a price signal for new construction in risk zones: the reform would make it costlier to build where risk is high. The note leaves the mechanism unspecified, but higher insurance charges for buildings in these zones would be the most direct route.

The note also calls for updated flood risk prevention plans, stricter construction standards where buildings are exposed to flooding or to subsidence from shrinking and swelling clay soils, and planning for relocation where risks recur. Passive measures such as insulation and solar shading come first, with air conditioning accepted in schools and hospitals. With 47% of French homes exposed to at least one climate hazard, the potential workload is considerable.

Share

Taxes, inheritance and savings

Box 1 of the Council note gives orders of magnitude for the budget adjustment options. The Council stresses that these are illustrations, not recommendations. For the property sector, two stand out: reinstating the residence tax (taxe d’habitation) on main homes would raise €22 billion, and raising corporation tax from 25% to 33.5% about €12 billion.

Two recommendations concern how wealth is passed on and invested. The first would tighten the Pacte Dutreil, a relief that exempts 75% of the value of business shares from gift and inheritance tax. The cost to the public budget rose from €1.2 billion in 2020 to €5.5 billion in 2024, with 1% of recipients taking 65% of the benefit. The CAE would limit the exemption to operating assets, which matters for family firms holding property.

The second recommendation would steer funds from France’s main long-term savings product (assurance-vie), now largely invested in bonds, towards equities and long-term assets. The Council’s aim is financing innovative firms.

Where a spending freeze would bite

Public works is the part of French construction most exposed to public budgets. Two-thirds of the sector’s activity comes from public clients, including 42% from local authorities alone. That reflects local government’s central role in public investment: municipalities, departments and regions accounted for 53% of all French public investment in 2023, €66 billion out of €123.2 billion, a figure that covers all their capital spending, not only public works.

That’s why contractors will take note of the CAE’s illustrative five-year freeze on local authority spending, worth around €19 billion a year. Public works activity is already weakening: the national public works federation expects a 3.2% fall in 2026, with work for local authorities down 6%. A freeze on central government spending would add to the pressure on infrastructure investment.

Housing, which accounts for over 60% of building activity, is less directly exposed to public budgets than public works. Social housing in particular is largely financed through loans drawn from regulated household savings such as the Livret A. Channelled through the Caisse des Dépôts, these loans amounted to €22.9 billion for social housing and urban regeneration in 2025, helping finance 108,000 new social homes out of 270,000 housing starts last year.

The trade-offs ahead

The note from the Council of Economic Analysis arrives at a moment when France’s public finances are under pressure from rising bond rates. The Council’s contribution is a set of recommendations that pair a credible fiscal consolidation with growth-focused reforms. It also makes the trade-offs explicit: even high-return measures cover only a fraction of the adjustment needed. Several levers will need combining.

To weigh up the trade-offs yourself, you can test your preferences on the Council’s budget simulator at simulateur-budgetaire.netlify.app.

The requirement for multiple stairs is one example. In the United States, the model building code permits a single stair in apartment buildings of up to only three storeys, though some states have begun to raise that limit. In England, new residential buildings with a top storey 18 metres or more above ground have required a second staircase since 30 September 2026. Designers must provide more than one escape route from each upper-floor apartment. While well intentioned, additional stairs undermine the investment case for housing on tight city centre sites.

Yet one look at a European architecture website shows that apartment dwellers in countries like France, Germany and Italy seem to live safely in single-stair buildings many floors off the ground.

How does France do it?

Where the rules sit

Fire safety in French housing is governed by the “arrêté du 31 janvier 1986 relatif à la protection contre l’incendie des bâtiments d’habitation” (residential fire safety order of 31 January 1986). Its legal basis is Article R142-1 of the Code de la construction et de l’habitation (Construction and Housing Code). The order applies to housing where the highest dwelling sites no more than 50 metres above ground. Taller residential towers fall under a separate high-rise regime.

The residential fire safety order’s starting point is set out in Article 17: escape routes must allow occupants either to leave the building unaided or to receive help from the the fire service.

Four classes of housing

Article 3 sorts housing into familles (classes) according to height and fire service access. The 28-metre threshold reflects the reach of fire-service aerial ladders: the order’s access rules are writen around ladders of up to 30 metres.

The first two classes cover houses and low-rise apartment buildings. The first takes in detached and semi-detached houses of modest height. The second covers other houses, and blocks of apartments no more than three storeys above the ground floor.

The third class covers housing where the floor of the highest dwelling is no more than 28 metres above the ground level that’s accessible to fire engines. The third class splits in two.

Class 3A buildings have no more than seven storeys above ground floor and no apartment door more than ten metres from the escape stair access. At ground floor, the stair entrances must be reachable from the voie échelles, the access road where the fire service positions its aerial ladders. The logic is that firefighters can reach both the stair and the facades quickly.

Buildings in class 3 that can’t meet the conditions of 3A fall under class 3B. Their stair entrance at ground level must be within 50 metres of a road accessible to fire engines, and inside the building, the protections of the vertical and horizontal circulation step up. The stair must be a protected stair, either open to the outside air or smoke-protected. The corridors must be smoke-controlled, either by detector-triggered vents on opposite facades or by a range of protected corridor provisions.

Where the local fire service has ladders tall enough, the mayor has discretion to allow class 3B buildings in that area to follow the lighter 3A rules.

The fourth residential building class covers housing where the floor level of the highest dwelling is above 28 metres and no higher than 50 metres. (Duplexes at the top of a building are measured at their lower floor level.) Above 50 metres, a residential building is classified as a high-rise building (IGH, immeuble de grande hauteur). IGHs are governed by a more demanding regime set out in an order of 30 December 2011.

Three approaches to stairs from 28 to 50 metres

For the fourth class of residential building, Article 40 of the residential fire safety order sets out a single objective: smoke and combustion gases produced in a corridor on fire must not be able to enter the stair serving the apartments. The article then offers three ways of meeting it, and leaves the choice to the building designers.

Only one of the three solutions requires a second stair. The other two rely on a single protected stair, kept free of smoke by natural ventilation or by mechanical pressurisation.

• Solution 1 uses two protected stairs at least 10 metres apart, with a protected corridor connecting every apartment to both. The corridor must be open to the air or have mechanical smoke extraction.

• Solution 2 uses a single protected stair. At every level, a small lobby separates the corridor from the stair. The lobby must have a permanent opening to the open air of at least two square metres. Its doors must be fire-rated, self-closing and open in the direction of escape. The article waives the need for the lobby where either the corridor or the stair is open to the air.

• Solution 3 also uses a single stair, but relies on mechanical ventilation. A fixed fan pressurises the stair. A ventilated lobby of about three square metres sits between the stair and corridor, supplied with fresh air through a fire-rated duct. The corridor is mechanically extracted, at a rate of at least 1.3 times the air blown in. Pressure steps down from stair to lobby to corridor, so smoke is drawn away from the stair.

Four buildings, one stair

In the following examples I describe how four buildings appear to comply with the residential fire safety order. My reading is based on published drawings and project information, not the permit files.

Angers: Arborescence

Arborescence, by WY-TO architects with Crespy & Aumont Architectes, was completed in 2024 on the banks of the River Maine in Angers. The architects describe it as a 35-metre vertical garden. The published section shows twelve levels, which places the top floor just inside the class four threshold.

The fifth-floor plan shows a cruciform corridor around a single central stair. The stair is reached through a small lobby. With no facade to provide the open-air ventilation that solution 2 requires, the arrangement is consistent with the mechanically ventilated lobby of solution 3.

Lyon: Îlot A3

Herzog & de Meuron’s tower in Îlot A3 was the first high-rise in Lyon Confluence 2, the second phase of the city’s riverside regeneration. The residential building was completed in 2017.

At the fifteenth floor (R+15), roughly 45 metres above ground level, the plan shows a single stair at the centre. It is reached from a short central corridor through a small lobby. As in Angers, the lobby has no facade, which points to the solution 3 arrangement.

Montpellier: L’Arbre Blanc

L’Arbre Blanc, by Sou Fujimoto with Nicolas Laisné, Manal Rachdi of OXO Architectes and Dimitri Roussel, opened in 2019. It rises 17 floors to 56 metres, with 113 apartments and a panoramic bar on the top floor.

The typical floor plan above shows two stair cores, but only one serves the apartments. Residents reach the stair serving the apartments via a small lobby. The second core has no door to the residential corridor, and the reason is likely to be the top-floor bar.

The residential fire safety order allows a class four building to include a public establishment, such as a restaurant, under certain conditions. The public use must not communicate directly with the housing, must hold no more than 500 people, and be served by at least two protected stairs. The sealed stair core in the Arbre Blanc plan appears to contain a scissor stair, providing the restaurant with two separate protected stairs interlocked in a single shaft.

Paris: Bruneseau B1A4

Bruneseau B1A4, by TCAU (Tania Concko architects urbanists) was completed in 2020 for Paris Habitat. It combines 64 apartments, 60 studios and a 44-place nursery, as well as shops and workspace.

The ninth-floor plan shows a single stair with no lobby between it and the corridor, and there are seven further floors above. The explanation from a fire safety point of view is visible from the street. The stair rises through a slot between two towers, behind a perforated screen open to the air. So the building appears to use solution 2 in its simplest form: because the stair is open to the air, the lobby is not required.

The Bruneseau site also illustrates the relevance of how the residential fire safety order measures height. The drawings show two ground levels: a walkway at 0 metres and the Boulevard du Général Jean Simon at plus 7 metres. Which of the two the fire service uses determines where the height is measured from for the purpose of fire regulation compliance.

Share

What a single stair relies on

The French approach to stairs carries obligations, such as regular checks of mechanical installations. Reports must be kept in a building safety register. Every solution assumes that the fire service can access the stair, which is why the classes are defined with reference to fire engine access.

In return, designers recover the floor area that a second stair would occupy on each floor level. On tight urban sites, that area can decide whether or not a scheme is viable.

Timber and fire safety

Fire regulations shape more than stair counts. In 2021, the Préfecture de Police, which oversees fire safety in Paris, published a doctrine on bio-based and combustible materials in construction. In a future article I’ll cover how French fire regulation is adapting to timber and other bio-based materials.

In previous articles I’ve covered the legal and planning protections that support ground floor retail in France. A nine-year minimum lease, an eviction indemnity payable by the landlord, index-capped rent increases, and planning controls on change of use. I also looked at how commercial vacancy has been rising in France in recent years, despite an 11 billion euro national programme for town centre revitalisation.

Those articles covered retail in existing urban districts. What I didn’t cover is how retail fares in new urban developments. In short, there’s a deficit of good ground floor retail in new districts. You can’t protect what doesn’t get built.

This article focuses on the ground floor experience of new districts generally. I’m leaving aside the developments that cluster around transport upgrades (retail development in station concourses and station-adjacent shopping centres), which merit an article of their own.

What the old street does by default

Active ground floor retail in historic neighbourhoods owes a lot to the way those streets were built: narrow plot by narrow plot, over generations, by many owners. Each building has its own entrance and a commercial unit on the ground floor.

The larger late 19th-century residential blocks, even if they extended a good 100 metres around a street corner, typically devoted most of their street-facing ground floor to retail. The retail in such a building was likely to be divided into a number of units. I’m thinking of my building, which occupies a street corner. On the ground floor there’s a driving instructor’s office, a nail bar, a bakery and a kitchen showroom.

New developments lack this rhythm. A new district is delivered in large lots, by a handful of developers, over a decade or so. Each block is designed as a whole. Whether residential or multi-use, the ground floor has to prioritise the building’s servicing needs, before accommodating public needs like retail.

A good district with a limited ground floor

Clichy-Batignolles in Paris shows this clearly. It’s a zone d’aménagement concerté (ZAC, a coordinated urban development zone) of around 54 hectares in the 17th arrondissement. For the most part, it’s transport-oriented development at its best. Substantial housing provision, private and social, built around a magnificent 10-hectare public park, and served by the extended metro Line 14 and suburban rail.

But retail was left behind. It lost out in the competition for street frontage: the competition with residential and office lobbies, car park entrances, bike storage rooms, station entrances, stair cores and bin stores.

Most of these competing uses are compulsory. Building and planning rules require secure bike storage. Fire safety rules dictate the number and position of stair cores. Every building needs a bin store that’s easily accessed from the street, and underground car parks need a ramp to the street. Retail is the only optional use on that list, beyond whatever minimum the local planning rules or masterplan require. So it’s the category that gives way when frontage is tight.

When retail doesn’t add up for developers

Ground floor retail in a new development is a weak line in the developer’s budget. An investor buying all the shops in one deal has no trading history to go on and often no tenants signed. It’s not unusual to see empty shells of retail space long after residents have moved in. So the investor bids on units where rents don’t exist yet and discounts for the empty period.

The protections described in my previous article constrain the investor for years and are priced into the offer: a nine-year lease, capped rent increases, and a contingent eviction indemnity payable if the landlord refuses to renew.

Housing, by contrast, is sold off plan before construction starts. Those presales count towards the 40 to 50 percent of units that banks and guarantors typically want reserved before backing the scheme. Since February 2026, under the Jeanbrun scheme, private landlords who buy a new apartment can deduct up to €8,000 a year from their taxable rental income, provided they let it below market rent. Shops get no equivalent. A rational developer therefore sees a ground floor shop as the least valuable and least certain part of the scheme, and builds no more of it than the aménageur requires.

In a ZAC, the aménageur (the public or semi-public body that assembles the land and sells serviced plots) has real influence at the outset. Through conditions attached to each plot sale, it can require minimum retail floor areas, generous ground floor ceiling heights, and active frontages on key streets.

Those conditions set how much retail is built, but rarely where it sits within each building or how it meets the street. What we see in reality, in ZACs from Paris to Montpellier, is ground floor retail that fills the space left over after a series of upstream decisions on lobbies, stairs, car park access and bike stores.

Retail that gets built but falls short

Even where retail is built, the experience can disappoint. Every unit starts at a new-build market rent. Investors value income certainty, so they favour tenants with deep pockets, usually national brands. The result is less diversity.

An old district’s independent shops often rely on rents shaped by decades of index capping, or an older, less marketable premises. A new district has neither of these.

Wide-frontage units mean fewer shops for a given distance along the street, and less interest for people walking past. A frontage that would hold four small shops on an old street, like the one downstairs from my apartment, might hold a single furniture or food store.

Even if the unit widths are right, the problem might simply be the facade. Above and below are two facades that read as an expanse of black reflective glazing. There are no masonry elements or shopfront structures to define each shop or clearly mark the entrance locations.

A traditional shopfront, in France or elsewhere, has masonry piers between bays, a framed opening, a signage band and a clearly placed door. You can read it clearly. A continuous run of dark glass gives you nothing to read. It’s like a strip mall layout transferred to a town centre.

Sharing what works

These problems are not unique to France. Wherever solutions emerge, sharing them internationally is critical for vibrant cities. Mobility lessons from seven metropolitan areas were shared in this way at the Apur Meetings in Paris recently. On 9 September, Apur (the urban planning workshop of Greater Paris) brought together Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo to compare how each is adapting its transport systems. Ground floor retail in new districts deserves the same comparative treatment.

Three areas for improvement stand out in France:

The first is viability for developers. If the shop is the least valuable and most optional part of the scheme, it will keep losing out. Alternative tenure models, or incentives that treat retail more like housing, could change that calculation.

The second is suitable form, with diversity of scale and use. Narrower units, a mix of sizes, and space for workshops and services with low floor area needs. These would give independent and micro enterprises a foothold.

The third is facade design, with human scale and orientation at street level. Shopfronts that define each unit and its entrance cost relatively little compared with the developer’s overall investment. They make the difference between a streetscape that’s a destination rather than one to walk past.

The protections covered in my earlier article work well once a shop is in place. In new districts, the harder task is getting good retail space built, with the right relationship to the street. It needs a rent that’s viable for independent retail and service-based businesses, and a frontage that’s engaging for passers-by.

If you have any thoughts on bringing diverse, high-quality retail to the street level of new urban developments, I’d love to read them in the comments.

Share

That protection only works if there is a business worth protecting. A commercial lease is an asset when the tenant can make a profit, and that depends on there being a population and passing trade to sustain the business. Where those have gone, the protections have nothing left to protect.

Vacancy in French town centres has risen more or less continuously for over a decade, driven by falling populations in provincial towns, car-based mobility, and four decades of growth in out-of-town large-format retail. Lease law addresses none of those.

What the numbers show

Across all retail formats, national vacancy rose from 9.3 percent in 2022 to 11.6 percent in 2025, according to figures from the property data firm Codata.

The increase was not evenly distributed. Ground floor unit vacancy in town centres reached 11.7 percent in 2025. Retail parks fared better, rising from 6.9 percent to 8.4 percent from 2022 to 2025. Shopping centres show both the highest rate and the steepest deterioration, going from 13.9 to 16.8 percent vacancy over the same period.

Regionally, the pattern inverts between formats. For ground floor retail, the Paris region of Île-de-France had the lowest vacancy in 2025 at 8.6 percent. For shopping centres the same region had the highest, at 20.1 percent.

Normandy, Pays de la Loire and Brittany also sat below the national average for ground floor retail vacancy. Occitanie, the southernmost region bordering Spain and the Mediterranean, had the highest at 16.4 percent.

What the government has tried

France has not left this to the market. In 2018 the state launched Action Coeur de Ville (Town Centre Action), a programme covering more than 240 mid-sized towns, with the aim of revitalising centres, improving quality of life and supporting balanced economic development.

Public funding was substantial: 6 billion euros between 2018 and 2022, and a further 5 billion euros to the end of 2026. The programme now sits within a wider family of interventions, including Petites villes de demain (Small Towns of Tomorrow) from 2020 and Villages d’avenir (Villages of the Future) from 2023.

Action Coeur de Ville has delivered. Housing has been renovated at scale, derelict buildings brought back into use, and public space improved.

Retail has proved harder. The 240-odd towns in the programme hold close to a quarter of France’s population, so this is not a marginal intervention. But the National Assembly’s evaluation committee reported in June 2025 that it has been markedly more effective at residential revitalisation than at sustaining local retail. Commercial vacancy in the towns covered stood at 13.4 percent in 2024, against 4.7 percent for housing.

Why vacancy keeps rising

Part of the answer is where the money went. France’s national housing agency, the Agence nationale de l’habitat (Anah), committed 1.2 billion euros to the programme, funding pre-operational studies, local project manager salaries and works grants. Some of that money paid for acquiring non-residential premises and converting them into housing. Anah’s main delivery vehicle is a housing instrument by design: the urban renewal and housing improvement operation (opération programmée d’amélioration de l’habitat, renouvellement urbain, or OPAH-RU).

The tax architecture points the same way. An individual letting unfurnished property in France is taxed on rent after actual costs, with no allowance for the building losing value. The 2026 finance law changed that for housing alone. Under the dispositif Jeanbrun, in force since February 2026 and successor to the Pinel scheme that ended in 2024, a private landlord can write down part of a let dwelling's value against rental income. The same landlord letting a shop cannot.

So an investor looking at a vacant shop in a provincial town centre faces a straightforward comparison. Reletting it as retail carries commercial risk and no tax relief. Converting it to a flat carries a state-backed tax incentive and a larger tenant pool.

The one fiscal instrument aimed squarely at vacant retail has been weak. The commercial dereliction tax (taxe sur les friches commerciales) applies to premises unused for at least two years. The tax is levied at 10 percent of cadastral rental value in the first year, 15 percent in the second and 20 percent thereafter. (Cadastral rental value is the notional annual rent the tax authorities attribute to the property.)

The commercial dereliction tax is optional for local authorities, and in 2025 only 480 communes and 68 groupings of communes had adopted it, out of around 35,000 communes nationally. It is not due where the owner can show the vacancy is outside their control, which is not hard to demonstrate.

The 2026 finance law loosened one constraint. Until then, an authority adopting the tax had to apply it across its whole territory. Authorities can now apply the tax to a targeted perimeter, such as a single town centre. A council that passes the necessary resolution before October 2026 can charge it from 2027.

Beyond tax, the structural causes of commercial vacancy are harder to solve. Rebuilding a town centre catchment means addressing access, parking, public transport and the location of public services. Those are multi-authority, multi-year commitments, and they cannot be delivered through a grant scheme aimed at individual buildings.

What stakeholders are recommending

In May 2025 the government commissioned a review of the future of local retail. It was prompted less by town centre decline as such than by the competitive pressure from online platforms. The review was carried out by Dominique Schelcher of Coopérative U, Antoine Saintoyant of the Banque des Territoires, and Frédérique Macarez, mayor of Saint-Quentin. They made thirty recommendations and the government took up nine of them in November 2025. Among them was the renewal of the 100 foncières programme. Under that scheme the Banque des Territoires has financed more than ninety local property vehicles that buy, refurbish and relet vacant units. A further 100 million euros was committed from 2026.

In June 2026, the National Retail Council (Conseil national du commerce, CNC) reported on commercial vacancy in French town centres, making forty proposals. According to the report, vacancy is not solely a retail problem, and treating it as one has not worked. Mobility and the liveability of town centres sit upstream of individual shop viability. The CNC argues that town centre and out-of-town retail are complementary, not competing formats, and policy must take account of new and emerging shopping formats and consumer preferences.

The most useful recommendation for anyone designing a programme elsewhere is what the CNC advises against: measures that focus on reletting vacant premises without addressing the viability problem underneath. A subsidised tenant in a unit with no catchment is a vacancy deferred, not a vacancy solved.

The transferable lesson

The transferable lesson is not that the French approach failed. On the residential side it plainly worked, and few countries have committed 11 billion euros over eight years to mid-sized towns. But commercial vacancy rose throughout. Understanding why is what other countries can take from this. Here are two reasons.

The first is that incentives decide outcomes more reliably than objectives do. France protects retail tenants through commercial lease law and planning controls. But it also has a funding and tax architecture that rewarded converting shops into housing. Both policies are defensible. One protects shop owners from sharp rent increases. The other addresses a real need for housing. Together they produce a town centre where the shop that survives is protected and the shop that fails risks becoming an apartment.

The second is that a vacant shop is a symptom rather than the condition. Renovating premises improves the town at the level of individual buildings. Causes of vacancy are broader: residents moving out, public services relocating, and the comparative ease of driving to a suburban retail park. A programme focused on individual buildings will not address those broader issues comprehensively.

Neither point argues against intervention. France’s housing delivery shows what public money can do when the instruments match the goal. The lesson when designing an urban renewal programme is to check that the tax code supports the programme objectives.

The next question

Lease protection and urban renewal funding that targets commerce can together help maintain diverse, independent ground floor retail. But that only works where the retail space exists. In newly developed districts that is not a given, and ground floor retail competes for street frontage with car park ramps, bin stores and residential lobbies. That will be the subject of the next article.

Visitors to Paris and other French cities marvel at the diversity of shops in city centres. Often so small and niche you wonder how they survive.

How do small retailers and artisans in France avoid the crushing rents that push out small retail in London and New York?

A commercial tenant in New York typically signs for five or ten years with no statutory right to renew. At expiry the rent resets to whatever the market will bear, the fit-out is a sunk cost, and the goodwill built over two decades of trading belongs to nobody in particular. Consolidated ownership sharpens the effect: an institutional owner holding a whole block can reposition the block in a way that a multiple individual owners cannot.

France produces a different outcome through four mechanisms working together. Ownership, at least in historic districts, is too fragmented to assemble. Removing a tenant is expensive. Raising the rent is capped. And when a tenant sells the business, the lease is assigned to the buyer, who gets continuity of the existing lease. A fifth protection sits outside the lease altogether, in the planning code.

Fragmented title

In historic city districts, the predominant building type is residential with ground floor retail. Within these buildings, ownership is highly fragmented, divided into separate lots corresponding to apartments or commercial units. This limits the extent to which an individual owner can consolidate ownership of a whole building, or persuade the building owners’ syndicate (copropriété) to authorise redevelopment works. This atomisation of title is a structural barrier to large-scale institutional assembly of commercial space.

At the city level in Paris, one category of institutional owners does have a sizable investment in ground floor retail: social housing organisations. These institutions, like Paris Habitat, RIVP and Elogie-SIEMP, collectively hold 6,800 ground floor commercial premises.

Social landlords let under the same Code de Commerce as private owners. What differs is the letting policy. The three landlords mentioned above market their ground floor units through a single vehicle set up in 2017, which lets at adapted rents with no agency fees and no key money.

The City of Paris also acquires units directly. Between 2004 and 2022, through the operation known as Vital’Quartier, its development company SEM Paris Commerces bought up premises, by pre-emption or private treaty, in streets losing their trade mix. The company renovated the units and let them to businesses like booksellers, food stores and artisans. It continues to acquire units today.

What eviction costs

A commercial tenant doesn’t have to rent from a social landlord to have excellent protection from eviction.

A French commercial lease carries a right of renewal. If a shop owner’s landlord refuses to renew the lease, he must pay the tenant an eviction indemnity equal to the loss caused by the failure to renew. There are only limited exceptions. If the building has to be rebuilt, the law gives the tenant priority for a lease in the rebuilt structure.

The indemnity amount is specific to the business and location. It’s based on a valuation of the business as a going concern, including the leasehold interest. Its takes in factors such as the business revenue over the last three years, the operating surplus, and the costs of disruption for having to move. The indemnity also accounts for the location and floor area of the unit being vacated. Based on a quick online calculation, the indemnity for a 100m² unit in the 17th arrondissement of Paris could range from €250,000 to €500,000.

The exceptions are narrow. No indemnity is due where the tenant is at fault on serious and legitimate grounds, or where the building has been officially declared unsafe.

In short, if the landlord wants to get out of a commercial shop lease, with limited exceptions, he’ll have to fork out several hundred thousand euro to buy out the lease.

The 3-6-9 lease

Leases for commercial and artisanal businesses are governed by the Code de Commerce (L.145.1 and subsequent articles). The law’s defining feature is a minimum lease term of nine years. If parties agree a lease with a shorter term, it is set aside and the statutory nine years applies, save for limited exceptions such as short-term, non-renewing leases up to three years’ duration.

It’s called a 3-6-9 lease, because the tenant (but not the landlord) can withdraw at the end of each three-year period. The landlord can only give notice before the nine years on a narrow set of grounds, such as reconstruction or renovation. Even then, he generally owes the eviction indemnity, unless he offers the tenant suitable replacement premises.

If there’s no termination within the nine years, the lease is considered to be extended by tacit prolongation. From that point it can be terminated by either side with six months’ notice. A landlord who ends the lease this way and does not offer renewal still owes the indemnity.

Once the nine years is up, you might think the tenant is vulnerable to a steep rent increase, but that’s where indexation comes in.

Capped, then gradual increases

Commercial rents are reset at three-year (triennial) intervals during the lease term, and on lease renewal. The triennial and renewal resets are subject to different capping rules.

Triennial

Either party can request a rent review after three years. If this brings a rent increase, it is capped at the variation in the quarterly commercial rent index or the quarterly tertiary activity rent index, both published by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE).

The main exception is if the landlord can prove a material change in the local commercial environment, such as a new metro station, that by itself caused a rental-value shift of more than 10 percent. If proven, the rent is set at market value, but even then the increase is smoothed: capped at 10 percent of the previous year’s rent per year until market value is reached.

Renewal

At the end of the nine-year term, the cap mentioned above continues to apply except in the following circumstances:

• The lease was granted for a contractual term of more than nine years.

• The lease duration continues past its term without renewal and reaches more than twelve years’ duration.

• A material change in factors such as the characteristics of the premises in question; local commercial factors; and rents commonly charged in the vicinity.

As with triennial increases, the increase is smoothed when a cap is removed after the nine-year term. Any increase to market value is phased at a maximum of 10 percent of the previous year’s rent per year until the new market-value rent is reached.

The lease goes with the business

A commercial lease in France is an asset that forms part of the business’s value as a going concern. Imagine a music store owner wants to sell the shop to a new owner. Does the buyer have to sign a new lease with the landlord? No. The existing lease is assigned to them, carrying its accrued tenure and terms intact: the same rent, the same position in the capping cycle, the same renewal date and indemnity obligation. The landlord cannot refuse.

What the buyer pays for is the accumulated gap between the capped rent and open market rent. That gap survives the sale intact, which is why a below-market rent can persist rather than resetting to market each time the shop changes hands.

Share

What the planning code protects

The music shops and workshops I mentioned at the outset are protected by more than their leases. Small retail is also protected in local development plans, like the Plan Local d’Urbanisme bioclimatique (PLUb) in Paris.

The lines in the map below - north west Paris - show different types of “Protection of commercial and artisanal street frontages” in the PLUb. The red line indicates the general protection of retail and craftsmanship frontages. The yellow crossed line indicates special protection for cultural retail. That’s where you’ll find the music shops that serve students of the nearby Paris Regional Conservatory.

The protections are restrictions on change of use. If a landlord were to evict a sitting tenant, they could only be replaced by tenants of the same type. The PLUb is explicit: “converting ground-floor spaces facing the street that are dedicated to cultural retail into an activity other than cultural retail is prohibited.”

The result on the street

French commercial leases facilitate long tenure, index-linked rents, and a saleable asset that allows new owners take over going concerns without sharp increases to market rent.

Commercial law protects the tenant and urban planning law protects the use. A landlord who pays the indemnity to remove a musical instrument seller may only have bought themselves the right to install a different seller of musical instruments.

Readers on the ownership side will already have spotted the cost. A contingent indemnity of several hundred thousand euro per unit sits against the real estate asset.

These protections apply just as much in a newly-developed district as in a Haussmannian block. In those new developments, whether the ground floor retail experience is of good quality, or whether it gets built at all, is a separate question. One for an upcoming article.

PS: Let me know in the comments or DM me if there’s any aspect of French urban planning and construction that you’d like to know more about.

In my last article on stone construction I featured a “pension de famille” – a small supported residence with shared spaces – at rue des Apennins in Paris. This housing type is one of many different types sitting under the umbrella term “social housing”. In this article I’ll outline what’s under the umbrella.

Side note on HLMs: despite what a Google image search or news article might suggest, HLM is a status, not a building. HLM stands for habitation à loyer modéré, moderate-rent housing: below-market rental housing let under income conditions.

The categorisation starts with the French public financing mechanisms for social housing. There are three main types:

• PLUS (Prêt Locatif à Usage Social), a loan for social-use rental housing. This is the most common funding line, financing most of France’s social housing stock.

• PLAI (Prêt Locatif Aidé d’Intégration), financing for integration-focused rental, for tenants with very low incomes. Résidences sociales and pensions de famille (such as the rue des Apennins building) are financed entirely through PLAI in combination with state and local capital grants.

• PLS (Prêt Locatif Social), a social rental loan to fund housing for tenants with a higher income ceiling than applies for PLUS-funded housing.

In practice a single building is usually financed by more than one of these funding lines.

Other funding for non-market-rent housing:

• PLI (Prêt Locatif Intermédiaire) funds housing for tenants with incomes above social housing ceilings but who cannot access market-rent housing. It’s an older intermediate-financing tool, largely superseded in new production by the LLI regime created in 2014, but still present in the existing housing stock.

• LLI (Logement Locatif Intermédiaire) is funding for intermediate rental housing, established in 2014 to fill the gap in high-demand markets between social and free-market rents. Rents are set at roughly 10-15% below local market levels, with income ceilings well above the standard social housing level. In Paris in 2026, the LLI ceiling for a single person is roughly 1.6 times that of the ceiling for PLUS-funded housing.

Neither PLI- nor LLI-funded units count towards a commune's SRU social housing quota.

Who lends to whom?

In a previous article, I wrote about a public financial institution with no real equivalent outside France: the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (CDC). It is a major funder of French social housing.

PLAI and PLUS funding is distributed exclusively by the CDC.

It can be accessed by organismes HLM (below-market-rent housing bodies), sociétés d’économie mixte (SEMs), local authorities, and certified non-profit housing associations. Borrowers include Paris Habitat (the largest social landlord in the Paris region with around 125,000 units) and Immobilière 3F / Groupe 3F (a social enterprise within Action Logement, with around 300,000 units nationally).

Recall that PLS funding is for the higher-income tier of social housing, including student housing. It carries no direct state subsidy (unlike PLAI/PLUS) but still confers a reduced VAT rate (10% on new-build PLS, the same rate that applies to new-build PLUS, against 5.5% for PLAI). PLS funding also comes with a 25-year property-tax (TFPB) exemption, extended to 30 years for schemes meeting environmental-performance criteria.

PLS funding is distributed either directly by the CDC or by authorised credit institutions that have signed a convention with the CDC.

With broader accessibility than PLAI/PLUS, PLS funds can be borrowed by entities such as local authorities and their groupings, health and medico-social establishments, local public enterprises, and private property developers.

Private individual and corporate investors can also access PLS funding.

Share

Who can access social housing?

The funding streams outlined above have income ceilings built in. To access a housing unit funded by a particular loan type, the tenant’s income must be below the relevant ceiling. For each funding type, in 2026 the thresholds in Paris for a single person are as follows:

• PLAI: €14,811.

• PLUS: €26,920.

• PLS: €34,996.

• PLI: €48,456 (funding was allocated before 2015); €44,344 (since 2015).

• LLI: the same as the current PLI (€44,344).

Shelter or housing?

The French distinction between hébergement (accommodation/shelter) and logement (housing) translates approximately to short-term versus permanent housing.

Hébergement is time-limited, often supervised accommodation such as a CHRS (Centre d'Hébergement et de Réinsertion Sociale) or CHU (Centre d'Hébergement d'Urgence). The occupant has no lease or tenure and there are typically support staff on-site.

Logement implies occupancy under a lease or equivalent contract, even where support is present, such as in a résidence sociale or pension de famille.

The funding acronyms are a useful shorthand. With the outline above, you can now identify who funded a social housing scheme, who can access it, and how secure their tenure is.

In this article I extend the list with five more recent French buildings that use this stone construction method. By load-bearing stone I mean building in stone that carries its own weight, or its own weight plus other building loads. The definition excludes stone cladding where each stone element is fixed to, or hung on, a separate structural frame.

Five from 2023-2026

The projects listed below, in Paris and Nouvelle-Aquitaine, feature load-bearing stone facades. I’ve included the costs per square metre as reported on the architects’ websites or in the trade press. They’re based on surface de plancher, roughly equal to gross floor area.

Since 2022 there have been significant construction cost increases in France. For that reason I’ve chosen not to list projects completed before 2023. As the costs relate to projects with differing timing, locations and site constraints, they’re not directly comparable across projects. They just serve to give a general sense of building costs.

ITAR Architectes - 124 apartments and 4 commercial units.

Rives de l’Ourcq, Greater Paris.

Completed in 2023. Cost: ~€2,040/m² excl. tax.

Atelier Cambium - “Novecento”, 18 apartments.

Le Bouscat, near Bordeaux.

Completed in 2024. Cost: ~€2,220/m² excl. tax.

SOA Architectes - 44 en-suite rooms (community housing) and a shop.

Rue de Clignancourt, Paris 18e.

Completed in 2025. Cost: ~€2,600/m² excl. tax.

Palast - 68 apartments and a medical centre.

Avenue Édouard Vaillant, Pantin, Greater Paris.

Completed in 2026. Cost: ~€2,790/m² excl. tax.

CQFD Architecture - 19 studios, a pension de famille.

Rue des Apennins, Paris 17e.

Completed in 2026. Cost: ~€4,370/m² excl. tax.

Behind the facade

On their website, Palast have documented their housing and medical centre project extensively. The project combines two structural systems:

• The facades themselves are load-bearing: cut stone laid in courses, described by the architect as load-bearing massive stone.

• Inside, it’s a timber post-and-beam frame with prefabricated timber-concrete composite floors. Precast concrete is used for the ground floor base and lintels.

Where the wall is pulled back from the stone facade to create a covered balcony, the enclosing wall structure is timber-framed. Palast’s Instagram post below gives a snapshot of the structure.

Palast’s hybrid stone-timber-concrete structure at Pantin contrasts with the choice of Perraudin and Archiplein for their 65 apartments in Plan-les-Ouates, Switzerland. In that project, the buildings of up to eight storeys rely only on stone for vertical loads.

Share

For a smaller example, we can look to CQFD Architecture‘s project pictured above, comprising 19 studios at rue des Apennins. Like Palast’s project, the external stone walls are load-bearing. However, the CQFD project differs markedly in build costs.

Of the five listed above, the cost of the studios at rue des Apennins is the outlier at over €4,000 per square metre. That can probably be explained by the small scale of the project, its tight inner-city site, as well as the costs of demolishing a previous building on the plot. The premium bio-sourced specification would also have pushed up the budget, which brings us to how these projects are insulated.

The CQFD project is insulated with bio-sourced wood fibre insulation. At Pantin, Palast insulated the stone walls internally with hempcrete.

Hempcrete also features in the community housing project by SOA Architectes listed above. As often seen in historic buildings, the architects have economised by only using stone on the front facade, where it harmonises with and contributes to the streetscape. On the courtyard side, a timber-framed wall is insulated with 26cm-deep hempcrete finished with a lime-sand render.

MAO architects used the same strategy for their housing at rue Pradier, where a stone facade faces the street. On the courtyard side, the timber-framed, hempcrete-filled structure is enclosed by Fermacell panels and finished with a lime plaster.

First questions

Is a permit needed, and if so, what kind? (I’ll assume we’re not just building a house extension). There are two key questions.

• Would the project change the use category of the site, building, or part of a building?

• Would the works change the building’s load-bearing structure or facade?

Use categories (destinations in French) are set out in articles R151-27 to -29 of the urban planning code (code de l’urbanisme). A change of use, as understood by developers and architects internationally, is referred to as a changement de destination in France.

Use categories and sub-categories are explained in this ministerial order; e.g. residential use (habitation) is sub-divided into housing (logement) and serviced housing (hébergement) sub-categories.

Getting an early steer

To get assurance on project feasibility, and reduce the likelihood of a long-drawn-out permit stage, it’s a good idea to meet planning authorities before plans develop.

At feasibility and early design stage, it’s possible to consult with the local planning authority (service d’urbanisme) to get a steer on the scope of acceptable development. The authority’s advice at this stage is informal.

To have greater certainty at the feasibility and design stage, the promoter can apply for a certificat d’urbanisme (CU) which comes in two forms. A CU d’information sets out the planning rules, easements and tax applicable to a given site. A CU opérationnel explains whether a specific project is feasible on the site. Both CUs have the benefit of freezing the planning rules for a plot for 18 months. This gives the promoter assurance to go continue with detailed design and permitting.

For projects in heritage-protected areas, it is possible and advisable to consult with the local state heritage architect, the Architecte de Bâtiments de France (ABF), prior to detailed design. That way, the promoter and designer learn ABF expectations on issues such as facade design, materials and roofline.

How an application is assessed

Once an application (for DP or PC) is submitted (dépôt de dossier), the planning authority has one month to request additional documents; the applicant has three months to submit those. The decision-period clock starts when the authority has the complete file.

• Minor works notification (DP): 1 month decision-period, rising to 2 in a heritage-protected setting.

• Building permit (PC): 3-month decision period, rising to 5 for heritage-listed buildings.

The architecture and urban planning aspects are assessed against the local development plan, the plan local d’urbanisme (PLU).

PLUs contain several files that require differing levels of compliance.

• The règlement (regulations) contains the written rules plus the graphic plans. Projects must conform to the regulations, meaning exact compliance.

• The orientations d’aménagement et de programmation (OAP) contain planning and programming guidelines. Projects must be compatible with the OAP, which is a looser form of adherence compared to conformity

• The PLU annexes list servitudes d’utilité publique (public-interest easements) arising from laws such as heritage or flood protection. These are binding on projects in the PLU area.

The City of Paris places a heavy emphasis on bioclimatic issues, to the extent that development in the city is governed by their plan local d’urbanisme bioclimatique (PLUb).

A decision postponed

Developers and architects can probably recall a time when their project was refused becauase the local authority was working on their next development plan, with an eye on the project site for future public works or easements.

When a French local authority is drafting a new PLU, what happens if a proposed project would compliate the PLU’s implementation? It can defer the application.

In French planning terms, a sursis à statuer is local authority decision to suspend the treatment of an application for up to two years. Developers can appeall these decisions: case law in recent years has put limits on local authorities’ use of this mechanism. The project must have a material effect on the ability to deliver a new PLU.

Premises open to the public

There is a separate process for buildings or part of a building open to customers, visitors or guests, établissement recevant du public (ERP). For example a shop, restaurant, bar or hotel.

Approval of works in an ERP validates compliance with fire/emergency measures and access for people with reduced mobility. When the works involve a DP, the ERP application is submitted and assessed separately. The ERP decision-period is 4 months.

In the case of a PC, the ERP application is done in the form of an ERP-specific file included in the PC application, and assessed in the same process. As with heritage-listed buildings, an ERP assessment extends a PC decision-making period from 3 to 5 months.

Referrals to other authorities

For ERP-related works, the local authority refers the safety and accessibility file to the departmental commission consultative de sécurité et d’accessibilité—the advisory body for fire safety and disabled access.

DP and PC applications may also be referred to other statutory bodies where the site or proposal triggers separate legal controls. These referrals can be processed within the decision-making periods mentioned above, or extend them.

The most common statutory referrals for urban projects relate to archaeology, the environment, and road or access constraints.

Projects in protected heritage settings are referred to the Architecte des Bâtiments de France (ABF) mentioned above. This is a corps of state heritage architects within the Ministry of Culture (at departmental level). Depending on the protection regime, the ABF’s opinion may be binding or advisory.

A full évaluation environnementale - environmental assessment - is unlikely for a single urban building. It becomes more relevant where the scheme forms part of a larger or phased development, creates substantial new floor area or parking, or affects environmentally sensitive land. The table annexed to Article R.122-2 of the Code de l’environnement sets out the relevant project categories and thresholds.

Share

Protecting the housing stock

Changement d’usage (change of use) in France is not what English speakers might assume. It has nothing to do with changes of ‘use category’, as described above, which the urban planning code governs.

Changement d’usage is a specific legal mechanism to control conversion of long-term housing to short-term lets or non-housing use.

The framework is set out from Article L631-7 onwards in the constrution and housing code (code de la construction et de l’habitation). Local authorities then decide whether to implement this framework in their area.

With access to housing and short-term lets a hot topic, the major cities like Paris, Lyon and Bordeaux use this law to control housing stock. It’s an approval process separate to development permitting, and an essential additional step for compliance.

To approve a conversion typically requires compensation: the applicant must convert an equivalent non-residential space, such as an office or shop, into housing elsewhere in the same sector. This is to offset the home removed from the long-term market. In the tightest central sectors the required compensation floor area doubles.

Since April 2026, for example, the City of Bordeaux requires double compensation in its central sector. Paris outlines its approach and provides guidelines on this City Hall webpage.

A system under scrutiny

The state auditors, the Cour des Comptes issued a report in September 2024 on the delivery of construction permits in France. Overall, the report found that the system is too complex, and the system and rules are difficult for applicants to understand. The report noted difficulties with requests for further information, as well as authorities adopting local rules (such as charters) outside the statutory urban planning framework.

Given the complexity of the system, and local variations in the treatment of applications, it is essential to have legal advice and consult a local architect when undertaking works that could require a planning approval or involve change of residential use.

PS. Let me know in the comments, any experience you’ve had (good, bad or indifferent) of French permitting, or any aspect of the process you’d like to know more about.

The National Picture

The Massif Central is immediately identifiable in the centre of France, west of Lyon, in the Auvergne. The central red-shaded area indicates deposits of granite.

Brittany also stands out, on the Armorican massif that extends into the Loire and Normandy regions. The numerous red points on the map indicate granite quarries.

The limestone that we associate with French buildings comes from the areas marked in blue.

As well as the Paris basin, limestone extends from the Lorraine region in the north-east, extending in an arc south-westwards around the Massif Central, through Poitou-Charentes, around to the Provence-Alpes-Côtes-d’Azur region in the south-east.

As part of an economic study published in 2024, SNROC, the building-stone trade body, provides a snapshot of the use of stone in French building.

In 2020, the French ornamental and construction stone industry’s revenue was €525.4 million (down 3.9% compared to 2019).

Most of the industry’s output is used for roads and funerary monuments. In 2020, 46% (as a proportion of sector revenue) was used for building. While most of French quarried limestone (85% in 2020) is used for building, the picture is almost the inverse for granite (24% in the same year, again by industry revenue).

The Paris Basin

Before I moved to Paris, one of my first ports of call on my visits here was the Pavillon de l’Arsenal near Bastille. These days I miss their excellent exhibitions on architecture and building, and can’t wait for their reopening after renovations. Back in 2018, the Pavillon held an exhibition on building in stone, framing it as a local low-carbon material capable of responding to the Paris region’s then goal of building 70,000 homes per year up to 2030.

The guide accompanying the exhibition featured nine limestone quarries to the north-east of Paris. How have things changed since 2018?

All nine quarries continue to operate. Ownership has consolidated around the Saint-Maximin basin, mainly under Rocamat/Iribarren and BPE Lecieux. The Violet, Vassens and Noyant quarries remain independent. What’s encouraging for the availability of stone is that the changes in ownership have come alongside fresh investment, such as re-equipment at Clocher in 2019 and a new plant at Noyant in 2024.

The carbon life cycle accounting required in French building since 2020 has only made local stone more compelling. See my previous article on stone’s carbon footprint, and the relevance of distance to site. SNROC’s study cited above quantifies the carbon impact of importing stone from various countries as far afield as China. The study was published in 2024, soon after RE2020 came into force, when carbon was only beginning to weigh decisively on building-material choices.

The Projects

All the projects shown as unbuilt in the Pavillon de l’Arsenal exhibition have now been completed.

• Jean-Christophe Quinton - Paris 6e - eight social housing units.

• Raphaël Gabrion - Paris 15e - nine social rental housing units.

• Eliet et Lehmann - Versailles - sixty homes, a health centre and offices.

• TVK - Paris 19e - a mixed-use quarter of housing, residences, hotel and offices.

• Vincent Lavergne and Atelier WOA - Rosny-sous-Bois, Greater Paris (east) - 283 homes with shops.

Can It Scale?

A ZAN (zero net land take) law, passed in 2021, now limits urbanisation in France. That is, the extent to which development can take place on natural, agricultural and forest land. At first glance, the law would seem to limit the expansion of stone quarries. But because the landscape can be restored upon quarry closure, their expansion is not counted as urbanisation. Therefore ZAN should not be a barrier to quarry capacity.

The Paris region’s latest urban plan, the SDRIF-E, maintained the goal of 70,000 new homes per year, extending it to 2040. The Pavillon exhibition guide predicted that there was enough quarry capacity in the Paris basin to support stone construction for 6,000 to 9,000 housing units.

The SDRIF-E requires 90% of homes in the Paris region to be built within the already-urbanised area rather than on greenfield land. That’s a rule about where building happens, not a shift away from new construction. Much urban renewal is dense new-build on infill and demolition-and-rebuild plots, precisely the setting of the projects listed above.

Renewal is therefore no barrier to load-bearing stone.

Share

For stone in French building, the binding constraint is skilled labour, not stone.

According to a 2025-2026 survey by France Travail, the French public employment service, stone-working is among the most recruitment-constrained construction trades.

80% of stone-trade recruitments were judged difficult by employers in 2025.

The 2026 survey places “professionals working with stone and related materials” second among all construction trades for recruitment difficulty at 75.8%, behind roofers (79.8%) and ahead of carpenters (75.6%).

PS. Architect Jean-Christophe Quinton, mentioned above, is presenting an exhibition, Pièce et forme, une poétique élémentaire de l’architecture, at the Arc en rêve centre d’architecture in Bordeaux until 25 October 2026.

A series of housing projects in Paris have already put a dent in the “too-expensive” perception. Like the 15 housing units on Rue Pradier in Paris by MAO Architectes, or the 17 social housing units on Rue Oberkampf by Barrault-Pressacco architects. Both were delivered as mainstream housing rather than high-end commissions.

But what if the advantage of load-bearing stone walls was less in the monetary price and more in the carbon saving?

What Counts as Massive Stone

A French architect colleague introduced me to the work of Gilles Perraudin over ten years ago. I was amazed at the beauty and simplicity of his buildings built purely out of massive stone blocks. I did wonder at the lack of insulation, but we’ll get to that in a later article.

The wave of 10- to 130-unit Paris-region schemes of recent years (Félix-Faure, Jean-Bart, Cévennes, Versailles rue des Chantiers, Triangle École-Évangile, Rosny-sous-Bois) consists overwhelmingly of composite self-supporting stone facades tied to a concrete or steel frame, rather than pure load-bearing masonry.

This article is about masonry construction where stone is stacked so each course bears on the one below. This can be the fully load-bearing approach associated with Perraudin, or the self-supporting stone facades tied to a supporting frame. Stone cladding as a rainscreen is not in this scope.

Where Stone Wins: Carbon

The case for load-bearing stone is made in a 2023 paper by de Toldi and Pestre. The paper was based on a study of French environmental product declarations (EPDs) with reference to the dynamic life cycle analysis required by the RE2020 building-carbon regulation. De Toldi and Pestre’s model found that cut-stone load-bearing walls generate 18.08kg CO2e/m², roughly 1.43 times better than cross-laminated timber (CLT) and 2.73 times better than slag concrete. These figures assume the industry-average wall thicknesses of 13, 20 and 24 cm for CLT, concrete and stone respectively.

Stone’s carbon competitor is timber. How far stone beats CLT depends on the method used to count the carbon a tree stores as it grows.

• Under the RE2020 regulatory convention, which credits that carbon up front, timber is counted as carbon-negative and beats stone.

• Under Levasseur’s dynamic method, which instead credits stored carbon gradually as the replacement tree regrows, stone comes out roughly 1.43 and 3.62 times better than timber, depending on the tree-growth model assumed and the building lifespan used.

Whichever method is used, stone’s own figure barely moves, while timber’s swings from best to worst.

Transport makes or breaks the carbon advantage of stone. The de Toldi and Pestre paper assumes an average quarry-to-site distance of 60 km nationally. At that distance, haulage is only about 12 per cent of a stone wall’s embodied carbon; stretch that to around 580 km and the wall’s total embodied impact doubles, with transport rising to 56 per cent of it. The low-carbon case therefore depends on local sourcing.

Subscribe now

The Processing Advantage

The thickness of stone is a plus point. Thin decorative stone has a higher carbon footprint, with more processing per unit volume. A thicker slab will spread a given level of processing across a greater volume. An earlier ETH Zurich study (Ioannidou et al., 2014) found thicker massive assemblies to have roughly a third of the carbon footprint per square metre of thin stone products.

Another point in its favour is the fact that stone is quarried, not manufactured. It’s mechanically shaped rather than chemically synthesised. De Toldi and Pestre put the carbon impact of cut stone about 2.7 times below slag concrete, at industry-standard wall thicknesses. A stone-sector presentation drawing on INIES data makes the gap look starker still, charting a massive stone wall at roughly half the embodied carbon of a reinforced-concrete wall, around 20 against 41 kg CO2e/m², though there a 40cm stone wall is set against a 20cm concrete wall, so treat it as indicative rather than a like-for-like contrast.

Share

The Premium, Examined

Fully load-bearing stone buildings are the exception. The self-supporting facade, by contrast, is a genuine mainstream option. The built pipeline of recent years consists overwhelmingly of self-supporting or hybrid facades on concrete or steel frames. That distinction matters for cost, because that facade choice is also the cheaper to build and, as we will see, the easier one to insure.

The sharper premium applies to the fully load-bearing approach. Supply is not the constraint: one regional estimate suggests Paris Basin quarries alone could already furnish enough stone each year for 6,000 to 9,000 dwellings in self-supporting facades, a point the supply-base article takes up.

As for the cost premium itself, a rare publicly cited figure comes from the president of the SNROC, the building-stone trade body, who puts the extra cost of a stone building over an equivalent concrete one at 6 to 10 per cent. Read it as a whole-building figure rather than the stone element alone.

The Insurance Question

Where does that premium come from? A large part of it is the insurance regime that applies to buildings, and their designers and builders, rather than the cost at the quarry gate or the shortage of specialist masons.

To provide the ten-year liability cover that’s required for French building, insurers typically only provide standard cover for standard building methods (techniques courantes). A fully load-bearing massive-stone system, with large blocks, thin joints and no concrete ring-beam, largely falls outside these. That places it in non-standard territory (technique non courante).

Non-standard building techniques must be declared to the insurer in advance, triggering a bespoke risk assessment and usually a higher premium loading.

There are two main ways to reach standard rates. A favourable ATEx, an assessment by the French building science centre, the CSTB, can let the technique be treated as standard. Alternatively, a project-specific quality plan overseen by the Centre Technique de Matériaux Naturels de Construction can satisfy the insurer without the technique itself being reclassified. The latter is the path taken at Barrault-Pressacco’s Oberkampf.

It is worth adding that these routes are not free. An ATEx carries CSTB assessment and testing costs, and a quality plan carries its own testing and consultancy fees. So while they keep the insurance premium at standard rates, they move part of the cost upstream rather than removing it. That’s one reason why a stone project can still carry a cost premium even when it is insured on standard terms.

According to the Ministry for the Ecologic Transition, in 2022 the French building sector represented 43% of annual energy consumption. It generated 23% of French greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

There’s another widespread negative impact of construction that GHG reduction doesn’t address: biodiversity loss.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, biodiversity keeps ecosystems stable and resilient. It supports food security, access to clean air and water, and protection from natural disasters.

The construction industry contributes to biodiversity loss through the destruction of habitats and land take (artificialisation des sols). Land take is defined in French law as the durable impairment of a soil’s ecological functions and its agronomic potential.

France’s national biodiversity strategy 2030, published in 2023, lists five pressures on biodiversity. Construction contributes to three of them: destruction and impairment of natural environments, climate change, and pollution.

As for action, reducing land take is a key measure. The strategy commits to capping total land consumption at 120,000 hectares over the 2021–2031 decade. That’s roughly one tenth of the Île-de-France region around Paris. This is part of the goal to cut in half the consumption of natural, agricultural, and forest land by 2030.

How does the French urban planning system implement net zero for biodiversity by 2050? We have to go back to 2019, when France held a Citizen Convention for the Climate. 150 citizens convened over a year, debating and then agreeing on 149 recommendations to protect the climate. One of their objectives was:

“Tackling land take and urban sprawl by making life in towns and villages attractive.”

The vast majority of recommendations made their way into a Climate and Resilience law passed in 2021. The law commits France to the absence of any net land take by 2050, a goal known as Zéro artificialisation nette (zero net land take). The 2050 target is supported by intermediate targets for each decade from 2021.

What does it mean?

The ZAN (zero net land take) law limits the extent to which development can take place on natural, agricultural and forest land (ENAF - espaces naturels, agricoles ou forestiers)

The figure to count is the amount of land urbanised in a given local authority area.

As a first step, the law took the national amount urbanised from 2011 to 2021 and legislated that only 50% of that amount could be urbanised from 2021 to 2031.

The amount would reduce further in the following two decades. From 2031 the measure changes from land consumption to net land take, so the 2050 target is a balance between land urbanised and land restored, not an end to building on undeveloped land.

For Bordeaux Métropole, that means a 520-hectare land take allowance to 2031. By 2024, 200 hectares of that had already been consumed.

The Métropole de Lyon had zoned 1,030 hectares as urbanisable (available for development) as of 2023. ZAN would require them to take 450 hectares of that out of the development pipeline by 2040.

How to implement it

When it comes to controlling the rate of urbanisation, France has the advantage of not being a federal state. Unlike the US or Germany, the central government and parliament in Paris can legislate on regional and local land use.

The 2021 law (as updated since) provides for ZAN requirements to be included in regional planning documents, and for local urban plans to be compatible with them. It’s a cascading series of plans that ensures national building limits are reflected in local permitting decisions.

The progressive reduction in net land take between now and 2050 must be reflected in local development plans. This limits the issuing of building permits on land not yet urbanised. It also encourages redevelopment of former industrial sites and wastelands.

This fundamental change in urban planning impacts all sectors of the economy, from the major cities to the smallest municipalities. Local authorities and public representatives at every level are impacted, having to balance local development expectations with biodiversity constraints.

To increase understanding and measure progress, a national observatory provides data and resources on reducing the consumption of natural, agricultural and forest land.

The limits on urbanising land means local authorities have to consider carefully what gets built on available land, and will guard their allowance. So what happens if the state or a national body wants to build a facility in a particular commune? What happens to the mayor’s land-take calculation if the SNCF (the national rail company) wants to develop a rail line, or a government-support foreign investor wants to build a data centre, in their commune?

The ZAN law sets aside a national allowance of 12,500 hectares over the 2021–2031 decade for projects with national importance. This allows strategic projects to go ahead while avoiding conflict over scarce land take allowances.

Share

Why France can implement ZAN (and others can’t, or less so)

It helps that France is a unitary, not a federal, state. That’s what allows law-makers in Paris to influence land-use in local communes down to the hectare.

Germany has a national target limiting land take: under 30 hectares per day for new settlement and transport by 2030, and net zero by 2050. However, it is non-binding. In Germany, land-use planning is primarily a regional and municipal matter. Compared to France, this makes it harder to implement a mechanism to reduce land take uniformly across Germany.

Likewise the US has no federal land-use competence; planning and zoning are constitutionally reserved to states.

In England, there would have to be a stronger legislative link between national policy and local plan-making, which the government’s own 2025–26 reform trajectory is not pursuing. If anything, English policy is moving toward loosening land-supply constraints (Green Belt release) rather than tightening them.

Switzerland has the closest equivalent to ZAN. Under its revised Spatial Planning Act (2023) cantons face a firm “stabilisation target”: outside designated building zones, the number of buildings and the amount of built-up land can grow by no more than 2% above the 29 September 2023 baseline. If a canton exceeds this limit, any new construction or land take must be offset one-for-one by demolishing buildings or restoring land elsewhere - a compensation system similar in function to ZAN’s land restoration offset.

Is it working?

A 2026 report by Cerema found that consumption of previously undeveloped natural, agricultural, and forest land (ENAF) has shown a downward trend at the national level since 2011. It reported that 2024 marked the lowest calculated level of ENAF consumption recorded since 2011, with 15,119 hectares consumed nationwide.

However, the period since the ZAN law has coincided with construction material cost and interest increases, and a property market downturn. Cerema itself attributes the fall to the cyclical decline in housing and commercial construction starts since 2020. Therefore the extent to which ZAN is responsible for lower ENAF consumption is not clear.

The framework is also under sustained legislative pressure. The TRACE bill, adopted by the Senate in March 2025, would abolish the 2031 milestone and push back the deadlines for regional and local plans. It is still awaiting a first reading in the Assemblée nationale.

Rather than see ZAN is a block on development, it’s worth referring back to the intentions of the Citizen Convention on the Climate. Reduced land take was intended to:

• Take action for biodiversity, the protection of peri-urban forests, and local agriculture; and

• Make city centers more attractive and socially diverse by revitalising businesses and economic activity, while also bringing nature into the urban environment.

PS: if you’d like to view the progression of land take in France over recent decades, check out the aerial photography on the Remonter Le Temps website: https://remonterletemps.ign.fr/comparer/

The product already has a CE mark, so it can access the European Union market. That’s all that’s needed to use it in France, right?

No, just because a system or product can be sold and used in German, Italian or Irish buildings (other EU member states), that doesn’t mean it can be used in French buildings.

This isn’t a matter of French product regulations; the real constraint is insurance.

It’s about how the French liability and insurance regime applies to builders and designers.

The French Civil Code puts specific levels of liability on building contractors and architects at 1-, 2- and 10-year points after a construction project handover date.

The designer and builder will look at innovative products through this liability lens.

The liability is matched to specific insurance requirements. How the French insurance industry views the products is key to builders’ and designers’ appetite to use or specify them.

How does the insurance industry assess a new or innovative material?

The process can be thought of in three levels.

• First, the French standards association, AFNOR (Association française de normalisation), approves unified technical documents (NF DTU) and other NF (normes françaises) standards. These define conventional construction practice in France. When works are executed in accordance with an applicable NF DTU, that use is generally treated by insurers as a standard technique (technique courante).

• Second, for products and systems not adequately covered by conventional construction standards, the French building science centre, CSTB, carries out technical assessment and testing. On that basis the independent commission CCFAT (Commission Chargée de Formuler les Avis Techniques) issues “technical advice” (Avis Techniques, ATec) and “technical application documents” (Documents Techniques d’Application, DTA) for the products or systems. It also issues ATEx opinions for experimental techniques.

• The third level is led by the work of the C2P - Product Risk Prevention Commission (Commission Prévention Produits mis en œuvre) within the Agence Qualité Construction. Drawing on CCFAT’s Avis Techniques and DTA, together with defect and claims experience from insurers and contractors, C2P maintains a Green List (Liste verte) of product and system families under ATec/DTA that are not under observation. Use of those products and system families within their defined domain is treated by insurers as a standard technique (technique courante).

Subscribe now

Product and system families that C2P places “under observation” (mise en observation) are not on the Green List. This has already happened to both our examples: vacuum insulation panels for wall insulation were placed under observation in 2016, and roof-integrated photovoltaic systems not sold as complete kits followed in 2018. The latter remain under observation as of early 2026.

Using non-Green-List products is treated as non-standard and must be declared to the insurer, who will then decide whether and how to underwrite it (with conditions, surcharges, exclusions, or refusal).

What does this mean in practice for an innovative material or system?

It depends on the cost implication for the contractor’s and designers’ insurance. The cost needs to be moderate. The contractor and designers need to be satisfied about the risk of liability for defects, at the 1-, 2- and 10-year stages.

While a product or system family may start out non-standard, off the Green List, under observation, it can eventually become standard.

Being under observation is neither the beginning nor the end of a product’s market life. It is a risk‑management phase during which manufacturers can (and do) work their way to Green List status by improving the technical record and demonstrating consistent performance at the level required for a given application.

Share

The roof-integrated PV system and the vacuum insulation panel examples show the same pattern: being placed under observation doesn’t shut a product out of the French market. It means the insurer must review and price the risk individually rather than covering it automatically.

For a manufacturer, that’s a signal to invest in building a performance track record: pursue an Avis Technique or ATEx, work with contractors (and clients) willing to use the product, and build the claims-free history.

A ZAC is divided into lots purchased by individual developers. When selling lots, the ZAC’s aménageur can attach environmental and technical requirements that go well beyond national regulations. They can set carbon caps, biosourced-material thresholds or timber-structure requirements.

Because it also chooses who builds through competitive selection, the aménageur can favour operators willing to trial new materials and methods. Some schemes reserve an explicit strand of experimentation on which the developer commits to innovating.

Applied consistently across a whole zone, this turns a ZAC into a testing ground where low-carbon and bio-sourced approaches can be mandated, delivered and compared at scale.

ZAC Chapelle Charbon is transforming a former railway logistics site north-east of central Paris.

Currently on site at Lot C, Heros Architecture and Atelier Villemard Associés are building 78 social and intermediate housing units, shared spaces, 6 artists’ studios and commercial spaces.

Lot C is built using natural, low-carbon materials like solid stone, timber and recycled steel. The rooftops carry solar panels, glass-roofed artists' studios and thick green roofs that accommodate wildlife and soak up rainwater.

Paris et Métropole Aménagement is carrying out the aménageur role at Chapelle Charbon. Find out more about this urban regeneration on their website (including a January 2026 update with maps, timeline and key facts here).

Subscribe now

Lot F at Chapelle Charbon, designed by Nicolas Lombardi Architecture, will deliver 41 apartments alongside ground-floor commercial and activity spaces.

The project utilises the Bail Réel Solidaire, a French community land trust mechanism. It provides permanent housing affordability by separating land ownership from building rights.

Construction at Lot F started last November. The structure is a mix of concrete and timber, with bio-sourced insulation. Check out the developer’s Instagram post below to see a façade mock-up on site.

Share

On the Seine’s Left Bank, ZAC Saint-Vincent-de-Paul is regenerating the site of an old hospital near Montparnasse, south of the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Paris et Métropole aménagement is also the aménageur here. Their Instagram post below shows construction progress on the Chaufferie, Petit and Pinard lots.

Chaufferie contains social and intermediate housing, shared and commercial spaces. Petit will also provide social and intermediate housing, while Pinard will contain a school, creche, gym and shared spaces.

Across these zones the same logic is visible on site. A single aménageur sets the material and carbon terms lot by lot. Low-carbon requirements are written into the sale conditions, rather than left to each developer.

Comparing how architects and developers respond to these demands, within the same ZAC, is one of the things that makes French urban regeneration worth watching.

France has a system for managing the design tensions and development trade-offs. A corps of heritage architects employed by the Ministry of Culture is deployed to every département in France.

These architectes des bâtiments de France (ABF) have a dual role:

• custodians of State buildings, and

• advisors to permitting authorities in the framework of urban planning law.

I’ll outline the planning advisory role below. In short, ABF give mandatory or advisory rulings on whether a proposed development fits in a protected historic setting.

Some responders to a French Senate enquiry in 2024, on the role of ABF, complained about subjective decisions.

Two cathedral projects illustrate how one corps of architectes des bâtiments de France can deliver very different styles.

French cathedrals are owned by the state, and works to renovate or alter them are overseen by the ABF. After a catastrophic fire in one cathedral, the architects returned the structure to its pre-fire state. The few differences include new liturgical furniture and a much brighter interior, thanks to walls cleaned for the first time in centuries.

The project was Notre Dame.

The other project was 300km south west of Paris in the Loire Valley, the Cathedral of St Maurice in Angers. In the 19th century a gallery on the front façade was removed, exposing the polychrome-painted sculptures around the main door to the sun.

The state architects wanted to replace the gallery to protect the paintwork from sunlight. The problem: there was very little documentation of the original design. So the ABF took a very different approach - modern simplicity, to a design by Kengo Kuma. A classical series of arches, no ornament. Concrete, though with carefully chosen local sand and aggregate.

But that’s just two projects.

The bigger picture is that France has managed to preserve the integrity of its countless beautiful historic villages, towns and city districts. And that’s thanks in large part to the powers and role of the architectes des bâtiments de France.

Share

What are the rules for development in heritage-protected areas? What is the role of ABF, and how does an architect or developer navigate the rules?

Building in heritage-protected areas

Heritage protection applies when two conditions are met: 1) a project needs a planning authorisation and 2) the site sits inside a protected perimeter. An authorisation can be a building permit, a demolition permit or a déclaration préalable (a prior declaration, a lighter consent for minor works such as a new window or façade change).

The main protected perimeters are:

• The surroundings of a listed monument: a default 500-metre radius, or a tailored perimeter set out in the local urban plan. Within a default 500m radius, ABF control is binding if the project is visible from the monument, or if both the project and the monument are simultaneously visible from a public vantage point. This is referred to as covisibility.

• A site patrimonial remarquable (SPR, remarkable heritage site): a whole town, village or a district of recognised heritage value.

• Classified or listed sites and other protected landscapes.

In these zones, the permitting authority must consult the ABF in relation to a permit application.

The role: what the ABF decides

The ABF sits within the unité départementale de l’architecture et du patrimoine (departmental architecture and heritage unit, UDAP), under the Ministry of Culture. In protected zones it issues one of two opinions:

• Avis conforme (binding opinion): the mayor cannot grant a permit against it. A negative opinion is, in effect, a veto. This covers most works that change a building’s external appearance in a remarkable heritage site, or within a protected buildings’ surroundings.

• Avis simple (advisory opinion): the authority may depart from it, but risks litigation at a later date. It is reserved for less sensitive cases, such as mobile-phone antennas, works on unfit or dangerous housing, and projects in a monument’s surroundings where there is no covisibility.

What the ABF assesses is broad: massing and height, materials and colours, façade rhythm and detailing, and impact on views to and from the monument. The governing test is insertion harmonieuse (harmonious integration) into the surroundings. That phrase is where much of the perceived subjectivity lies.

The ABF also shapes the rules upstream, co-authoring the local heritage plan and helping to draw the perimeters themselves.

Subscribe now

Navigating the process

For an architect or developer, the following area a few practical points to keep in mind:

• Check the heritage protection boundary. Before buying land or starting the design process, confirm whether the site is within 500 metres of a protected building, a remarkable heritage site, or a classified site. These perimeters are publicly mapped.

• Engage the ABF early. They encourage consultation early in the design process. The heritage architects can give observations on a preliminary design, before submitting a building permit application. This ensures the plans already take likely heritage requirements into account.

• Budget for ABF requirements. The formal opinion usually comes with conditions on materials and detailing (timber windows rather than PVC, use of local stone). These are decided case by case, so add a budget contingency. Early consultation narrows the uncertainty.

• Build in extra time. An ABF referral extends the permitting process by about a month. The timeline gets longer if the design has to be reworked during the permitting process. A change in external appearance means the heritage architect is consulted again.

• Know the appeal route. The options and deadlines will be set out in the local authority decision. Appeals can be brought to the regional prefect (the state’s representative in the region), or the administrative court.

In response to the housing crisis, a government bill seeks to dilute the veto power of the architectes des bâtiments de France

The bill (projet de loi Relance Logement) includes an ‘operation of local interest’ mechanism for areas with a housing shortage. Housing projects with this label would get derogations from the local urban plan, and ABF opinions would be advisory, not vetos.

In a Le Figaro op-ed at the beginning of July, a group of academics, historians and public figures complained that the Relance Logement law would lead to a soul-less France full of concrete. Referring to a 2018 “Elan” law that weakened ABF powers, they complained that the Relance Logement law would be its culmination.

Energy efficiency and renewable energy roll-out are high priorities in French construction. They’re also central to the tension between development and heritage protection. The 2024 Senate enquiry on the ABF role heard complaints about:

• blocked solar PV installation on houses and apartments in heritage-protected areas, and

• deadlock around external insulation and façade alterations.

The Senate report documents numerous cases where homeowners within protected areas sought rooftop PV installations to meet rising energy costs and energy performance obligations, only to face repeated refusals or highly restrictive conditions from ABF.

Owners or social landlords have tried to apply off‑the‑shelf exterior insulation systems to old‑style façades. But ABF have refused these solutions on the basis that they both disfigure the historic appearance (by thickening and flattening façades and hiding traditional materials).

The technical risks for old, moisture‑sensitive walls are also taken into account. ABF instead steer projects towards less visible or more tailored forms of energy renovation, but these may be more expensive and reduce internal space.

It’s clear that there’s a tension between France’s ambitious climate goals and protecting its outstanding architectural heritage. Differing approaches to renovating a cathedral, and the proposed Relance Logement law making its way through Parliament, show maintaining a workable balance is a subject of ongoing debate.

PS: A YouTube video on the Angers cathedral project.

The pattern will feel familiar in the UK, Ireland, Australia or North America: a low-carbon, energy-reducing regulation creates a cost premium, and gets a lot of the blame for a housing slowdown. France’s case is worth a look for anyone watching the same trade-off unfold at home.

Before RE2020, French buildings were constructed to meet Réglementation thermique RT2012. The requirements of RT2012 covered:

• Primary energy consumption.

• Thermal performance of the building envelope.

• Summer comfort, measured by the conventional interior temperature, a static indicator based on a conventional five-day heatwave. The RE2020 replaced it with the degree-hour indicator.

RE2020 enhanced the regulation in pursuit of more efficient and decarbonised energy consumption; reduction in carbon impact of building elements and site works; and greater occupant comfort during periods of intense heat.

Specifically, it requires calculation of:

• Non-renewable energy consumption.

• Greenhouse gas emissions from buildings’ energy consumption over 50 years.

• Greenhouse gas emissions from the construction product life-cycle and site operations.

From 1 May 2026, RE2020 is no longer mainly a housing and office regulation. 13 new building types have been added to the framework: hotels, restaurants, retail, childcare facilities, hospitals, universities, sports facilities, and industrial buildings among them.

RE2020 brought two areas of cost increase

Materials. The carbon impact limits drive a need for low-carbon alternatives to standard materials such as concrete and fossil fuel-based insulation. As alternatives have been less available in the market, and builders less familiar with them, the price is typically higher, even with increased demand.

Learning curve. When designers implement a new design requirement and new tools for design calculation and reporting, when builders adopt new (or ancient) materials, fees and labour rise. In the period after a new regulation, these costs are added to the project budget.

Two cost drivers - the move away from concrete and towards heat pumps

The concrete industry mounted a strong campaign against the mandated methodology for calculating carbon impact in the life-cycle assessment (LCA). The dynamic LCA method weighs near-term carbon emissions more heavily than future emissions. Another debate occurred when a revised carbon calculation standard was adopted (EN 15804+A2). This time it was the timber industry calling for change: the new standard treats biogenic carbon as cycle-neutral, meaning no sequestration credit for timber.

The shift from gas condensing boilers to heat pumps, district heating and photovoltaics brings higher capital costs. That didn’t stop heat pump penetration in individual housing surging from 47% in 2022 to an estimated 71% by 2024. Nonetheless, industry groups point out the difficulty for small builders in adapting to complex thermal envelopes and heat pumps.

What’s the real cost impact?

Before RE2020 came into effect, a Senate Information Report (No. 434 of 2021) noted the government-acknowledged added costs of +3% to +5% initially, +5% to +8% from 2024 to 2030, and +7.5% to +15% from 2030. It also recorded industry estimates of up to around 10% in the short term (the FFB around 9%, the CAPEB 7% to 10%), while the study the Senate itself commissioned put the increase for individual housing at 3.4% by 2024.

Despite calls to compensate energy suppliers for a demand shock, and households and professionals for increased costs, the government did not introduce subsidies. The Ministry of Ecological Transition argued that the regulation would drive industrial competitiveness and enhance the export positioning for French construction.

Limited government support at first. By 2024, the housing slowdown was too much to ignore.

In the face of early opposition, the government referred back to the early years of implementing the previous standard, RT2012. Despite widespread industry predictions of a 10 to 15 percent cost increase at RT2012 introduction, a study by the association of quantity surveyors found the observed outcome to be negligible, with learning effects absorbing the theoretical cost increase. The government also pointed to energy savings that RE2020 would drive.

From 2023 onwards, housing production indicators deteriorated sharply. Thereafter, the government discourse shifted from “competitiveness” to protecting “the sustainability of the regulatory trajectory”. To get a proper insight into the RE2020 cost impact, the Minister for Housing, Valérie Létard commissioned the Rivaton report in March 2025. It’s the most up-to-date and independent economic analysis of RE2020-induced costs.

Share

The Rivaton report (July 2025) quantified additional costs of 11 percent due to RE2020

What Rivaton found:

• RE2020 induced additional costs of +11% across the full trajectory to the 2031 milestone (excluding learning effects). The increase is broken down as +2% for insulation, +3% for heating and domestic hot water, and +6% for low-carbon materials. (The government states the 11% figure as materialising by 2035, once buildings meeting the 2031 threshold are built out; some industry bodies frame the same +11% as covering the 2022 to 2031 period.)

• The move to a tighter standard for calculating carbon emissions (EN 15804+A2), without a proportionate adjustment to the limit in RE2020, made previously compliant designs non-compliant.

• The degree-hour (DH) methodology to measure summer comfort is insufficiently granular to reflect actual heat stress patterns under climate change scenarios, and the regulation’s treatment of active cooling was deemed overly restrictive.

• The current regulatory framework creates perverse incentives to sacrifice amenities that raise living standards (balconies, loggias, ceiling heights, glazed surfaces), to hit carbon targets.

The report added some qualifiers:

• Rivaton was asked to test whether the 2025, 2028 and 2031 implementation milestones are sustainable, not to reopen the case for RE2020 itself. He is explicit that the +11% figure is a verdict on the pace of implementation, not on the regulation’s merit.

• The report is built on 62 stakeholder hearings and independent analysis of around fifteen recent operations. That’s a smaller sample than the earlier 40-project study by the quantity surveyors’ industry organisation. Rivaton flags his report as a picture rather than a comprehensive census of RE2020-related building costs.

• As with every study before it, Rivaton acknowledges he cannot cleanly separate the RE2020-induced costs from other drivers: material price inflation from 2021 to 2022, the interest rate shock.

Qualifiers aside, the cost of housing couldn’t be ignored, and changes are underway.

What Rivaton recommended:

• Keep the calendar, adjust the dial. The report explicitly argues against suspending or delaying the 2025, 2028 and 2031 milestones, on the grounds that regulatory instability would cost the sector more than the thresholds themselves.

• Instead, the report proposes raising the 2022 to 2024 carbon ceilings by around 40 kgCO₂/m² (roughly 5%) to correct for the A1 to A2 methodology change that made previously compliant designs non-compliant.

• A recurring principle in the report is that carbon compliance should not be bought at the expense of balconies, ceiling height or glazed surfaces, so it recommends threshold modulations for ceiling heights above 2.5 metres and for external amenity space.

• Rivaton calls for the degree-hour indicator to be revised to reflect real heatwave risk, and for the effective prohibition on active cooling systems to be lifted, arguing the current rules leave new housing genuinely exposed to climate-driven heat stress.

The government has already acted.

• A decree (n°2026-200, March 2026) updated RE2020 and came into force on 1 July 2026. It did not adjust the carbon limit as Rivaton recommended, to correct for the shift from EN 15804+A1 to EN 15804+A2. This has been held over for a later decree.

• What the 1 July decree did was adjust the carbon assessment parameters to allow for more ceiling-height and external amenity space. There’s also an allowance for upward extension with additional floors, and a softened regime for high-rise buildings.

• Summer comfort measures are still pending. The degree-hour indicator overhaul was deliberately held back from the March 2026 package because of its technical complexity, and a second decree addressing it is expected later in 2026. This same second wave is also expected to include the carbon-ceiling adjustment for EN 15804+A2. As of writing, no draft text has been published.

The easier fixes came first: more ceiling height, more balcony space. The harder ones, correcting the carbon limit and revising the degree-hour rules on summer heat, are still to come.

Meanwhile, the rapid increase in AI capacity and adoption is a driving force for digital transformation of building design, manufacture, assembly and construction. Climate change is driving stricter regulation of climate, carbon and biodiversity impacts.

Architects, engineers, quantity surveyors, as well as material manufacturers and building contractors, are responding with innovation in everything from material science, to AI-enabled design, to off-site construction and on-site robotics.

Innovation in the largest French construction companies

VINCI, the industry leader by revenue, is active in concessions (infrastructure operations, roughly 16% of group revenue), energy solutions, and construction (infrastructure and buildings).

The second largest of the French construction majors is Bouygues. Construction (infrastructure and buildings) represents about half of group revenues. Energy and services account for around a third, with telecoms and media making up the rest.

For Eiffage - third place in the French construction league table in terms of revenues - concessions bring about 16% of group revenue. The rest comes from construction - infrastructure, energy systems, and buildings.

How the top 3 do innovation differently

VINCI launched “Leonard” in 2017 as the Group’s dedicated foresight and innovation platform. It was explicitly designed to overcome the challenges of digital transformation and environmental transition across the group’s highly decentralised, multi-business structure. Leonard comprises 4 structured programmes:

• The SEED Programme provides incubation support for early-stage startups (under two years) in construction, mobility, energy, and real estate verticals. Since 2019, the programme has supported 32+ early-stage startups.

• VINCI’s CATALYST Programme is an accelerator for mature, funded startups seeking industrial partnership and international growth with VINCI companies. Since its launch in 2019, the CATALYST programme has helped startups sign more than 1,000 contracts with VINCI companies.

• The group also runs an intrapreneurs programme. Employees with ideas spanning multiple Group activities can apply to become intrapreneurs within the company. Since 2017 it has supported 85 projects and created 36 new activities or entities within VINCI.

• Through its AI Programme, VINCI runs machine learning training and AI deployment projects in partnership with the group’s business entities.

Bouygues operates innovation at multiple levels: a Group-wide intrapreneurship programme, division-specific R&D labs, and an open innovation programme connecting employees with external startups.

• Les Entrepreneurs / Innovate like a Start-Up launched in 2016 as a cross-group intrapreneurship programme. It brings together around 50 employees per cycle from all of Bouygues’ business segments (construction, telecom, property development, and roads) to invent solutions for sustainable cities.

• In parallel, Bouygues Construction operates its own division-level acceleration programme, the Bouygues Construction R&D Acceleration Programme, in partnership with Schoolab (an innovation consultancy).

• In addition to the R&D Acceleration Programme, Bouygues Construction launched Scale One in 2024 - an innovation facility located at Chilly-Mazarin in southern Paris.

Eiffage’s internal approach to innovation is the most decentralised of the three. The group’s Sustainable Development and Transversal Innovation Department is at the centre of a network of division-level innovation correspondents.

• Start’lab is a series of small innovation cells that convene around specific strategic themes (notably artificial intelligence, hydrogen, and carbon calculation), functioning as internal technology scout groups.

• E-FACE is Eiffage’s Carbon-Energy Arbitrage Fund. Endowed with €2 million per year, the fund is a voluntary initiative that offsets the cost differential between a conventional energy solution and a more expensive, low-carbon equivalent. The fund is an internal subsidy mechanism for Eiffage’s own project managers and subsidiaries.

• Seed’Innov is the group’s internal co-financing fund, supporting innovations created by one or more Eiffage subsidiaries (up to 50% of project cost). Since 2017, the combined Seed’Innov and E-FACE funds have supported 111 projects for a total of €13.4 million.

Share

Bio- and low-carbon material innovation

VINCI Construction has co-developed and patented Exegy, a range of low-, very-low-, and ultra-low-carbon concretes, launched in September 2020. By 2025, Exegy represented 74% of all concrete used by VINCI Construction on its building projects in France, with a stated 2030 target of 90% of its concrete globally.

Eiffage’s most commercially mature material innovation happens in Eiffage Route, whose two dedicated laboratories have produced a portfolio of proprietary biosourced and recycled road materials.

Eiffage’s products include Biophalt, a warm-mix asphalt with ≥30% recycled pavement content and a plant-based regenerating binder from the French forestry sector. It was validated on Université Gustave Eiffel’s fatigue test rig, showing no structural defect after 2 million 13-tonne axle loadings, the point at which conventional asphalt typically fails.

Cyneo is a dedicated subsidiary of Bouygues created in 2023. It aims to industrialise the construction material reuse supply chain at a national level.

Cyneo operates physical reuse technical centres equipped with reconditioning workshops, 1,000-pallet storage, a digital marketplace for matching supply and demand, and a showroom. The first centre opened in Vitry-sur-Seine (Île-de-France) in November 2023, diverting over 1,500 tonnes of materials diverted from waste in its first year.

Off-site construction

VINCI Construction does not operate a single off-site facility comparable to a timber factory or modular plant, but it has innovated in the delivery of prefabricated concrete elements through its Tunnel Factory model, applied most prominently on the Grand Paris Express. This involves industrial production at a third-party precast plant, Stradal.

In 2024, Eiffage renamed and renamed its Industrialized Solutions division, creating Eiffage Construction Hors-Site (the French term for off-site). The division coordinates Eiffage’s specialised industrial subsidiaries like Savare (timber) and B3 Ecodesign (modular containers).

In 2026, Eiffage Construction was awarded a 5-year contract by RTE, the French electricity network operator. Eiffage will design, manufacture, and install 450 modular buildings (including 1,125 prefabricated timber-frame modules) for electrical substations across metropolitan France. Modules are produced at Savare’s Normandie factories.

Digital transformation

At its l’Archipel headquarters in Nanterre, Greater Paris, VINCI deployed a building operating system (SpinalCore, developed by SpinalCom). The system is built on a dynamic digital twin that links the BIM model to data from the building’s sensors and technical systems, to improve asset management and the services offered to occupants.

Bouygues has developed a digital twin capability anchored in 2IN, a digital twin platform developed by Colas, Bouygues’ road and infrastructure subsidiary.

In 2024 Eiffage entered into a strategic partnership with Google Cloud. The partnership deploys data warehousing and analytics, AI model training and generative AI. On the Grand Paris Express, Eiffage Génie Civil used the Novade digital platform to enable real-time quality, safety, and progress reporting.

Share

The innovation imperative - the policy drivers

Two legislative frameworks dominate the construction groups’ innovation agendas.

A new French environmental standard (RE2020) came into force for new residential construction in January 2022. It’s one of the more demanding energy-efficiency and carbon reduction standards in Europe.

RE2020 requires not only operational energy performance but a whole-of-lifecycle carbon assessment (ACV - Analyse du Cycle de Vie) from raw materials supplies through to end-of-life stage. This creates a strong incentive for innovation on embodied carbon in concrete, and drives the integration of low-carbon alternatives such as mass timber.

France adopted legislation towards zero net land-take (Zéro Artificialisation Nette - ZAN) in its 2021 Climate and Resilience law. The legislation targets a 50% reduction in net land-take (urbanisation of greenfield sites) by 2031, and net-zero land take by 2050. ZAN intensifies demand for vertical densification, adaptive reuse and modular construction as alternatives to greenfield development.

Both regulations have made biosourced materials, circular economy mechanisms, off-site construction, and digital lifecycle tools commercially imperative, no longer voluntary differentiators.

Partnerships to drive change

Since 2008, VINCI has maintained an academic partnership with the ParisTech consortium, specifically AgroParisTech, Mines Paris–PSL, and École des Ponts ParisTech. This evolved into the Lab Recherche Environnement VINCI ParisTech in 2019. VINCI has invested over €12 million cumulatively: €7 million in the first two cycles; €5 million renewed for 2019–2023, renewed again in November 2023 through 2028. Research priorities span energy efficiency in buildings, biodiversity, and sustainable mobility.

ISAI Build Venture is a Bouygues corporate venture capital vehicle in partnership with ISAI (a French digital VC active since 2009). The fund targets startups developing software and hardware solutions to accelerate the transformation and decarbonisation of Bouygues’ businesses across construction, real estate, transport infrastructure, and energy. It deploys tickets of €500,000 to €5 million across seed to Series C rounds.

The company cooperates with Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facility Engineering on digital twin research.

Eiffage has a long-standing relationship with Université Gustave Eiffel, beginning with road materials research. This evolved into the E3S Programme (”Eco-quartier Sobre, Sécurisé et Smart”), a research-action programme around the LaVallée eco-neighbourhood development in Châtenay-Malabry (Greater Paris). The €2 million programme brings together 26 research laboratories and practitioners in thematic innovation workshops (circular economy, sustainable mobility, digital urban tools, well-being, responsible water management, low-carbon sites)

French construction innovation is a broad field, and this piece has only mapped the larger players.

If there is a particular area you’d like covered in more depth, whether a technology, a company, or a regulation shaping the sector, let me know in the comments and I’ll take it up in a future edition.

Ciarán

The whole (re)development operation, from land assembly to residents moving in, is managed in a single account. Strategic land value capture is a fundamental component of ZACs. The integration in a single account captures value to fund roads, networks and public amenities before a single plot is sold.

First steps in a ZAC

A collectivité (local authority) sets the zone’s boundary, establishes the mix of housing, offices and public amenities that it wants, and appoints an operator (aménageur) to administer the project from land assembly to occupants moving in.

The aménageur runs one account across the lifetime of the zone. Fifteen to thirty years is normal. The account is the bilan d’aménagement (development account). It’s a multi-decade cash-flow projection and balancing account. The development account includes every expected cost and receipt, from the first land purchase to the final handover of buildings and public spaces.

In the early years the development account mainly contains expenses: buying land (usually by negotiation, with compulsory purchase available where needed), then preparing and servicing sites. These are then sold to promoteurs (property developers), who construct the buildings.

The land under schools, parks and other amenities is eventually transferred to the local authority. The receipts that pay for all of this come, overwhelmingly, from the sale of the serviced plots sold to developers.

Land charges and value capture

On the income side, the dominant item in the development account is charges foncières (land charges). These are prices paid by developers to the aménageur for building plots. The price set by the aménageur is differentiated by programme type (free-market housing, social housing, offices, retail, facilities).

In the finished buildings, end-user prices in open-market units correspond to the prevailing market price. An apartment buyer or commercial tenant will weigh up options within the ZAC against others across the city.

However the land charge - the developer’s site cost - is not based on an open market value of the plot itself. It’s based on a reverse calculation starting with the expected sale value of the completed scheme. From that value is subtracted construction costs, professional fees, finance and the developer’s margin. The resulting sum is charged to the developer; it’s the highest price they can pay for the land while maintaining the scheme’s viability.

By charging the residual of the sale price minus allowable costs and margin, the aménageur captures the planning and infrastructure premium the ZAC itself creates. That value contributes significantly to the budget for public amenities and social housing.

Share

Ability to Pay

I mentioned the reverse calculation starting with the expected sale value of the completed scheme. What about non-market-based units like subsidised or social housing? The land charge is adjusted in these cases. This adjustment is built into the ZAC approach - referred to as péréquation (cross-subsidisation).

The plots that can bear a high charge are priced above their share of the infrastructure cost. The surplus covers the plots that cannot. Open-market housing, in effect, carries the social housing and the public amenities around it.

Two observations

Two noteworthy findings emerged from a 2024 study by the Institute of Advanced Studies for Action on Housing (IDHEAL), “Transparence sur les ZAC”. The first concerns which building use carries the lion’s share of ZAC development costs. The second relates to which cost category dominates the development account.

The common belief regarding ZAC operations is that profits from office development fund the housing. Across the thirteen operations IDHEAL examined, it was open-market housing that carried the highest land charge. Housing subsidised the offices, not the reverse. The land charge for social housing came in at around 65% of the open-market housing charge.

As for the dominant cost in the development account: across IDHEAL’s sample, land averaged 21% of total spend, ranging from 3% on a former military site in Brest to 46% on dense private land in Montreuil. The largest single line was infrastructure: roads and networks averaged 40%. Based on the study, opening up an enclosed inner-city site can cost as much as servicing a green field, sometimes more.

How the UK compares, and why the difference matters

As outlined above, France fixes the cost framework for a whole neighbourhood upfront, in one account, before plots are sold. The UK settles infrastructure costs site by site, after the value has already been created by the urban plan zoning. In England, two mechanisms are used.

The first is Section 106 (S106) agreements. These are obligations negotiated site by site as a condition of planning permission: for contributions to affordable housing, local infrastructure, and so on. There is no national tariff. What a developer provides depends on what the authority can extract in negotiation.

The second mechanism is a Community Infrastructure Levy. This is a fixed charge per square metre of development. It is set by each local planning authority, but only around half of planning authorities have adopted one. The rest rely on S106 negotiation alone, which is known to be slow and costly.

The cost of the UK approach extends beyond inefficiency. A 2026 report for the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence described the negotiation system as a “complexity industry,” where expertise is unevenly distributed and the better-resourced side tends to win. The report found that developers paid on average 2,450% more for sites than the land values they themselves declared when later arguing, at the planning stage, that the scheme could not afford its full affordable proportion. In reality the developer paid a high price, betting the social obligations could be negotiated away. When they are, the original landowner has already pocketed the uplift, and the public loses the affordable housing, infrastructure and amenities the land value could have funded.

The French ZAC works the other way round. The site cost (land charge) is worked back from end values and fixed in the concession agreement before the developer bids. There is no later negotiation stage at which the obligations can be reopened and bargained down. The obligations come out of the land value uplift, as intended.

Most US tools capture value after the fact. Tax increment financing freezes the property-tax take in a district, then ring-fences the future rise in tax revenue as property values climb to repay the cost of the infrastructure. Developer impact fees are fixed, published charges levied per unit when the building permit is issued, set to cover the roads, utilities and schools that new development requires.

Both tools wait for the market: neither involves assembling land or funding infrastructure before the development gets the green light, which is what sets the French model apart.

California’s Mello-Roos districts come nearest to the French approach, funding infrastructure upfront through bonds, but the bill falls on future residents as an annual levy over decades. It doesn’t adjust the land price at the point the developer buys it.

The common thread of most Anglophone systems is that authorities collect after the fact. They wait for permission to be granted or values to rise, then take a share of an uplift that has already landed in private hands. France reverses the order: it commits the spending first and recovers it from the land price charged to the developer.

When the music stops

As the land charges in a ZAC are linked to projected open-market sale costs, the ZAC timeline exposes the operation, and the development account, to the highs and lows of the market cycle.

A ZAC planned in a rising market reaches its plot sales years later, possibly in a downturn. Site preparation and infrastructure is front-loaded and land charges and other receipts come later. Any delay in selling plots inflates the aménageur’s financing costs and the development account balance gets closer to negative . Who absorbs a deficit depends on the contractual link between the local authority and the aménageur.

Where the collectivité runs the zone directly, in régie (direct management), it carries the whole risk on its own budget. Where the zone is handed to an operator under concession, the contract decides. Real risk only passes to the operator if the risk is contractually transferred. Where the authority guarantees the operator’s debt, or agrees to buy back unsold plots, the risk stays in the public domain.

The Paris Rive Gauche ZAC was created in 1991 on 130 hectares of former railway land. It shows where public exposure leads. The development was meant to be complete in 2006, but the regional audit court now puts the realistic date at 2032. The City of Paris has put in at least €1.42 billion into the project, once off-account public works are included, and guarantees the aménageur’s debt on preferential terms. The court’s conclusion was blunt: the city underwrites the commercial risk.

Smaller ZACs in deficit simply get cancelled. In 2024 the commune of Villemomble closed a ZAC operation that was facing a forecast €8m deficit, swallowing the sunk study costs. And the present downturn is testing the model across the board, with new-home reservations roughly halved against 2019 and unsold stock at around 18 months’ worth of sales.

In the national statistics, areas with the highest housing pressure correspond to those with higher employment rates.

Reindustrialisation is a French priority, central to its sovereignty concerns, and the effort is visible around Dunkerque, a port city on the northern coast. The area is set to host a new generation of nuclear reactors at Gravelines, alongside two battery gigafactories at Bourbourg and Craywick whose appetite for power is part of the case for that new capacity.

But as the article in Le Figaro made clear, the employment generated by reindustrialisation is feeding the housing crisis.

Last April Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced new measures to spur housing delivery and urban regeneration. They’ve taken shape in a Relance logement bill to be presented to Cabinet on June 24th.

Didn’t France update its planning laws last November?

Yes, with the Huwart law of November 2025. But it only addressed planning risk and the scope for litigation, alongside various simplifications of planning law. It didn’t address interest rates, construction costs, unsold stock and developer solvency.

Despite the European Central Bank reducing its deposit rate to 2 percent by May this year, a 10-year French treasury rate of 3.69 percent keeps retail mortgage pricing high. This puts severe downward pressure on developers’ pre-sale rates, rendering many projects unviable.

The numbers behind this developer solvency crunch tell a stark story of structural cost inflation. Currently, construction material costs remain stubbornly elevated at 25.6 percent above their 2010–2019 baseline, outstripping the 21.2 percent increase seen in general consumer prices over the same period.

Construction labour costs surged by 6.6 percent in 2022 (more than three times the historical average) and climbed a further 4.1% in 2023. While these labour expenses have largely plateaued through to 2026, they have locked in at a high level.

Share

Private residential development was buoyed in recent years by the Pinel fiscal incentive, a tax reduction of up to 21 percent of the acquisition cost of new-build investment-for-rent. But it expired at the end of 2024.

So far the replacement device, the “Jeanbrun” fiscal mechanism, introduced in January 2026, has had only a modest impact. According to the Federation of Property Developers, the Jeanbrun mechanism generated only around 550 additional investor-purchaser reservations by the first quarter this year.

Over 100,000 new-build homes available but empty

That’s not because the homes aren’t needed. It speaks to the financing problem where the amount a buyer can borrow doesn’t match the amount the developer needs to achieve a profit. One of the reasons why new hires drawn to a region struggle to house themselves near their jobs.

By mid-2025, 9,265 units were completed but unsold, lingering on developer balance sheets. That represented a 91 percent increase year on year and 10.8 percent of total commercial supply, well above the ten-year average of 7 percent.

As for the total number of new-build units available for sale — planned but not started, under construction, and built — that total was 118,927 by Q1 of 2026, with a national average sale period of 20 months.

Over 2025 as a whole, residential permits totalled 379,222, 15 percent above the depressed 2024 level. Construction starts for the full year to January 2026 were much lower at approximately 277,230 units. With the private buyer-side financing constraint unaddressed, it’s easy to see how developers delay breaking ground once permits are issued.

Zero net land take

France has a legal framework to limit urban development on natural, forested or agricultural land - the Zéro Artificialisation Nette (ZAN) framework. Originating in the 2021 Climate and Resilience law, the ZAN framework aims for zero net land take by 2050. The 2021 law set an intermediate target to be reached in 2031: a 50 percent reduction in net land take compared to 2011–2021.

The law for the simplification of economic life (Simplification de la vie économique) passed in April 2026 relaxed ZAN for “projects of major national interest”. No such exception exists for housing.

While the 2050 final deadline is secure, the interim 2031 target is still heavily contested and could be pushed back or effectively neutralised by the TRACE bill currently making its way through parliament.

In the meantime, ZAN restrictions are limiting the land available for housing. Sales of agricultural land for urban purposes fell 24.3 percent in 2024 to 10,400 hectares, a thirty-year low. The federation of rural development companies (FNSAFER) has attributed this to the ZAN effect compounded by cyclical construction cost and interest rate pressures.

What would the Relance logement bill do that the Huwart law didn’t?

Third cycle of urban renewal

France established two cycles of major urban renewal in recent years. The first (ANRU 1), the Programme National de Rénovation Urbaine, ran from 2004 to approximately 2015. €12 billion was committed to upgrade around 500 priority neighbourhoods.

The second cycle (ANRU 2) starting in 2014 covered approximately 450 neighbourhoods, with a budget ultimately reaching around €10 billion. ANRU 2 is ongoing, with a completion deadline now extended to 2032.

The Relance logement bill creates a third cycle, ANRU 3. Where the first two covered only disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods - typically large post-war housing developments - ANRU 3 would also benefit medium-sized towns that face economic decline.

Rental market reopened for energy-hungry apartments

Existing regulation has taken the least energy-efficient housing, the ones rated G, off the rental market. F-rated homes are set to be removed in 2028.

In theory this regulation would have incentivised property owners to upgrade. But it met the hard reality of increasing construction and borrowing costs. The Relance logement bill would keep both F- and G-rated homes on the market.

Extension of the Jeanbrun tax mechanism

The current version of this mechanism incentivises private investment in new-build apartments for rent, and existing apartments provided renovation works are carried out representing 30 percent of the purchase price. The Relance logement bill extends this to existing individual houses, a significant expansion since houses represent a large share of France’s older private rental supply. Also, the threshold for the value of renovation works in existing properties drops to 20 percent.

Accelerated permitting for priority projects

Under the bill, mayors would get a formal initiating role in prioritising specific housing projects for accelerated permitting. This would move the projects to a fast-track process at the prefectoral level, bypassing local planning procedures.

Office-to-housing conversion

The Huwart law contained a framework plan for conversion to housing in the Parisian business district La Défense, a response to high levels of office vacancy. The Relance logement bill creates a specific legislative framework to facilitate conversion from commercial to residential use in the quarter. It serves as an precursor to what may become a broader regulatory template for reconversion nationwide.

Share

The Huwart law brought welcome changes to permitting procedures, and more certainty over the planning framework that applies once a development is permitted. What it left untouched is the gap between what a buyer can borrow and what a developer needs to break ground. The Relance logement bill reduces that gap.

Le Figaro documents existing workarounds to the housing shortage: France Travail paying €31 a night towards a new recruit’s first month, a Lyon foundation housing staff in budget hotels, employers in the Basque Country buying property themselves.

The question is whether the law that emerges from the Relance logement bill will bridge enough of the financing, viability and affordability gaps, and make current housing workarounds unnecessary.

His question was simple. Where is all the construction happening?

In the capital and across the length of the country, he had passed very few building sites, and almost no new-build.

In a recent article I wrote that France’s construction industry delivers more than three times the economic value of France’s celebrated aerospace industry. So how can an industry that large be hard to see?

A few factors explain the contradiction between French construction’s economic value and its visibility.

Timing: we are in a historic slump

New construction has fallen sharply for three years, on both the residential and the commercial side.

Housing has taken the heaviest hit:

• Housing starts dropped to around 263,000 units in 2024, about a third below the 2019 pre-pandemic level.

• Single-family detached houses, the most visible category of all, fell about 29% to roughly 68,000 starts, the lowest in decades.

• Developers’ new-build home sales collapsed to about 59,000 units, close to half the 2022 figure.

Commercial and industrial building has followed the same curve:

• Non-residential floor space started fell about 11% in 2024, a second straight annual decline after a drop of roughly 15% in 2023.

• Offices and retail led the fall. New retail schemes built from scratch have all but vanished, and office demand is still adjusting to remote working and surplus space.

The construction sector shed roughly 35,000 jobs between 2022 and 2024, with a further 20,000 to 30,000 going in 2025.

The apparent lack of building is partly due to a cyclical trough driven by high interest rates, the end of subsidised buyer schemes, and tighter lending. The cranes are fewer than usual. But a slump in new-build doesn’t mean a slump in construction overall.

Share

Behind the facades, the less visible sites

Most French building activity is renovation and maintenance rather than new construction: refurbishment and the energy retrofit of the existing building stock.

• New-build fell to 43% of building activity in 2024, its lowest share since the crisis of the late 1990s. In a normal year renovation and maintenance represent the larger share of construction, closer to 53%; the slump has widened a gap that was already there.

• Maintenance and improvement work reached roughly €118 billion in 2024, of which about €31 billion was energy renovation.

• The state retrofit scheme MaPrimeRénov’ funded around 340,800 renovations in 2024 (€3.29 billion in aid), and more than 2.4 million dwellings since 2020.

This is insulation, heat pumps, new windows, kitchens and bathrooms, and the refitting of shop and office interiors. It rarely needs a crane, a hoarding or scaffolding. Walk past a centuries-old facade and the activity, and the value, may be entirely inside.

Commercial property is making the same pivot. After a decade of heavy output that delivered more than 7.5 million m² of new offices in Île-de-France, the new-build pipeline has fallen back to 2016 levels. Developers are pausing schemes and turning to refurbishment.

At La Défense, vacancy has reached around 15%, among the highest on record. Only a couple of new schemes broke ground in 2025, while roughly 250,000 m² in obsolete towers is being restructured for energy and layout upgrades.

Concentration: building where tourists are scarce

What new construction there is clusters in a few regions, and within them on urban edges and former industrial land.

Logistics is the clearest case. France’s stock of large warehouses (those of 10,000 m² and above) has reached around 90 million m². It’s concentrated along the Lille–Paris–Lyon–Marseille corridor and across the north and east, where the four leading regions hold close to 60% of it.

Reindustrialisation, a national priority, drove about 2.74 million m² of construction in 2024, concentrated in the north and the Alpine east: the Dunkirk “battery valley” and the Grenoble–Crolles semiconductor cluster.

Public and collective buildings such as schools, hospitals and sports halls are one of the few growing categories. In Île-de-France they made up 30.5% of permitted new-build in 2024.

These logistics and industrial buildings are located on the edges of urban zones. Public facilities are dispersed across suburbia. They’re rarely on the typical tourist path.

The biggest project is mostly underground

The Grand Paris Express, Europe’s largest infrastructure project, is invisible by design. The €36 billion project in Greater Paris, with 200 km of new metro and 68 stations, is still on site. Most of it is underground: tunnel boring, station boxes, equipment galleries, behind hoardings in suburbs a central-Paris visitor never reaches (Saint-Denis, Champigny, Saclay).

The same holds for public works generally. Roads, rail, water and energy networks are linear, often buried and widely dispersed, not concentrated photogenic sites.

Data centres, the highest-profile commercial build-out in France today, mostly follow that pattern above ground: low, windowless sheds in suburban industrial parks such as Essonne and Marne-la-Vallée, with landscaping designed to keep them discreet.

A conspicuous exception can be found in Marseille, a data centre hub due to the submarine cables landing there. One of the city’s most striking buildings is Digital Realty’s MRS3, a data centre that occupies a former WWII German submarine bunker on the harbour front.

Historic centres, frozen by heritage law

A visitor’s mental map of France is made up primarily of the historic areas where new construction is most tightly constrained. Whole districts in Paris are designated Sites Patrimoniaux Remarquables (Remarkable Heritage Sites). Any construction, demolition or even exterior change within sight of a listed monument requires sign-off from the Architecte des Bâtiments de France (state heritage architect).

In the Instagrammable centres of Paris, Avignon, Aix and Bordeaux, large visible new-build is rare. What construction does occur is small and easy to miss: roof-raising (surélévation), which Paris actively encourages to add homes without taking new land, and reconstruction behind retained facades.

Rural France: two speeds

Outside the metros, the gap between statistics and visible activity widens, and “rural France” is really two different places. New building concentrates on the coasts and around a few dynamic southern and western cities: France’s coasts alone took 1.6 million new homes between 1990 and 2020, about 17% of the national total, built at close to three times the average density.

The interior is the reverse. Across the low-density “empty diagonal” that runs from the Ardennes to the south-west, and through much of the vineyard-and-village country a visitor actually drives through, most of the 35,000-odd communes see only a trickle: a single house or a barn conversion here and there, never a concentrated site.

Policy reinforces this. France’s Zéro Artificialisation Nette (ZAN, “zero net land take”) aims to steer development onto already-urbanised land.

This reduces the edge-of-town building on greenfield sites that a traveller notices from the road. It’s worth noting that the ZAN framework is politically contested: the TRACE bill moving through Parliament would heavily loosen the rigid interim 2031 trajectory and exempt vital social housing, while keeping the 2050 goal.

The direction of travel still favours infill over sprawl. And much rural construction spending is in fact renovation: energy retrofits, second homes, heritage repair.

So he was not wrong

The visitor was reading a real signal. France is building less new housing than at almost any point this century. The country’s construction effort is weighted further to renovation; billions are being invested underground and along transport corridors; and commercial development is focusing on discreet data centres and industrial sites. French construction remains highly active, but it’s not so obvious from a café terrace in the Marais, or the vineyards of a Provençal chateau.