IAU île-de-France

Backed by its experience in the Ile-de-France region, IAU île-de-France has also become progressively a leading expert abroad in the field of urban and metropolitan development and management.

The IAU îdF international activities include short-term consultancies, participations into multi-disciplinary studies and the management of some major projects. Beside the publications on sale in english, most of the technical reports are available at the Media Library.

Today, garden cities clearly set out unmatched advantages: harmonious urban organisation, vast wealth of architecture and landscape, attachment and ‘living together’ ability.
Ebenezer Howard was the first to define the garden city as a general model for ubanisation, a spatial and economic model (Garden Cities of To-Morrow) a hundred years ago. The first English garden cities and garden suburbs (Letchworth, Welwyn) put into concrete form the joint theories of Howard and Unwin, and were the basis for an extension of garden cities across the world.

The garden city movement in France

The garden city was advocated in France by institutions such as the Association des Citiés-Jardins, the École des Hautes Études urbaines, and by personalities like G. Benoit-Levy and Henry Sellier. After World War I, the garden cities became the typical programme for the social housing estates built on a planned urbanisation basis on the periphery of towns.

Urban organisation of garden cities

Garden cities can provide many lessons from several points of view:

- Quality of adaptation to the natural site or existing urban site; - Richness of the urban morphology and of the landscape that it structures; - Treatment of public or private open spaces- Combination of different types of dwellings of a diversified urban morphology.

Garden Cities for the 21st century: a model for urban development?

An international symposium organised by IAU île-de-France will provide an opportunity for: - Evaluating the relevance of the founding garden cities principles based on an integrated approach of 21Ist century urban development; -  Assessing the specific development of French garden cities compared to European and worldwide examples; - Placing further reflexion on quality social housing, even in dense urban areas; Interrogate eco-districts as well as  new urban settlements in a moving urban landscape.

In ECOTALE, IAU îdF is clearly positioned as a research centre. Fifty years’ experience of urban planning in the Paris Region gives IAU îdF a vast fund of specialist expertise to draw on, making IAU îdF a major public agency with a unique ability to react to current issues and concerns. Its contribution in ECOTALE will deal with the identification and analysis of experiences, case studies and best practises conducted by all partners in the past or in process, included those led in the Paris Region. 

Four years after the adoption by the Regional Council of the 2008 draft plan, two years after the passing of the Greater Paris Act, and the consultation of the Council of State, the new masterplan for the Ile-de-France region (the so-called “SDRIF”) has been adopted by the Regional Council after two days of intense and rich debate, on 25 October 2012. Within an intensifying and global crisis context, it addresses the challenges facing the region over the next few decades, such as promoting greater solidarity, making the food issue an ever greater concern of development policies, adapting the region to a changing environment... It is also a land-use planning document for the Ile-de-France area looking forward to 2030.