In France, the state has historically had the power to implement urban policies and to define urban planning instruments. During the decades following the Second World War, Five-Year Plans were implemented at the national level with the aim of restoring production and infrastructure. An ambitious regional development policy (aménagement du territoire) was launched in 1948 when Eugène Claudius-Petit, Minister of Reconstruction and Urban Planning, launched a National Regional Development Plan (Plan National d’Aménagement du Territoire), initiating a genuine public policy to spread economic and demographic growth over the entire territory. Through this policy, Claudius-Petit wanted to make regional planning a major focus of government action. In his view, economic renewal should be accompanied by a geographical reorganisation of economic activity to curb harmful concentrations. Paris must stop draining the provinces of their population, and the provinces must be actively supported in their economic, social and cultural development. This policy was implemented in particular through the establishment of factories in the provinces that had initially been planned for the Paris region. Citroën set up in Rennes, Renault in Cléon, and Kodak in Châlons-sur-Marne (Pouvreau 2003).

After a dozen years of regional planning efforts, the DATAR (Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale) was created in 1963. It differed from the central administration in that it had a flexible organisation, made up of staff recruited for short-term assignments in the various government departments. Reporting directly to the prime minister, DATAR played a key role in driving, facilitating and coordinating the government’s regional development policy. Its role was twofold. In terms of policy development, DATAR was responsible for designing long-term regional development policy. It gradually strengthened this role by publishing reports and forecasts on regional development and planning. Secondly, in terms of policy implementation, DATAR has been responsible for coordinating the policies pursued by the various ministries. It led many new policies. To avoid urban concentration in large cities, particularly Paris, and achieve multipolar urban development,  five new towns were designed in the Paris region (Évry, Cergy-Pontoise, Marne-la-Vallée, Sénart and Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines) and four others in provinces (Val-de-Reuil, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, l’Étang de Berre and L’Isle-d’Abeau on the fringes of the conurbations of Rouen, Lille, Marseille and Lyon). Although located within a metropolitan area, each new town must attract residents, ensure a balance between housing and employment, and offer a wide range of facilities and services. The aim is to make new towns relatively self-sufficient.

In parallel, the state compelled the municipalities of the largest conurbations outside Paris (Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux, etc.) to group together in intermunicipal cooperation bodies. The aim was to remedy the institutional fragmentation of these conurbations into dozens of municipalities by creating a cooperative authority on issues such as transport, waste, water and housing.

In the rest of the country, so-called ‘medium-sized’ towns were subject to industrial deconcentration from the Paris region. In order to support local employment growth, housing was provided in large numbers. The development planning of medium-sized towns was seen as necessary to attract and retain a workforce from the countryside, where the mechanisation of agriculture was being imposed.

This spatial planning doctrine with a strong economic component was accompanied by new regulatory planning instruments. Master plans (Plans d’Urbanisme Directeur, later renamed Plans Directeurs d’Urbanisme) were guided by a key principle: the specialisation of space (Demazière 2018). France adhered to the Athens Charter’s functionalist principles, and 800,000 dwellings were built in the form of large housing estates in the outskirts of cities. Following the same logic, numerous industrial parks, shopping centres and university campuses were planned. France established a hierarchical system of land use planning in which the national government established guidelines for planning urban regions to which detailed local land plans by municipalities must conform. Adopted in 1967, the Land and City Act (Loi d’orientation foncière, LOF) set out the principle of the joint preparation, by the state services and the municipalities concerned, of two types of urban planning documents: the Land Use Plan (plan d’occupation des sols, POS) and the Master Plan for Development and Urban Planning (Schémas directeurs d’aménagement urbain,  SDAU) which was intended to set the guidelines for the development of a city-region (Douay et al. 2014). In elaborating an SDAU, the views of the state services had more weight than the opinion of the local authorities, and the final approval of the plan was determined by the prefect. However, the SDAU had been conceived in a context of strong economic and demographic growth and the situation in the 1970s and 1980s proved much less favourable to planning (Douay et al. 2014).

From the beginning of the 1980s onwards, France underwent gradual decentralisation and planning power shifted to the municipalities. From then on, the local plan (POS, later renamed Plan local d’urbanisme, PLU) was drawn up and approved by the municipality and the Schéma Directeur replaced the SDAU. However, the state retains important prerogatives in defining higher-ranking legal norms and exercising the right to control the legality of the acts of decentralised authorities. In this relationship between the central and local levels, the territory is recognised in the environmental code as the ‘common patrimony of the nation’, from which it follows that ‘each public authority is the manager and guarantor within the framework of its powers’.

National level

Despite decentralisation, national authorities have sought to provide a framework for the exercise of local responsibilities in urban planning. First of all, various laws have been passed for certain high-stake areas, such as mountains and coastlines. Thus, in 1986, the law for the development, protection and enhancement of the coastline (loi pour l’aménagement et la protection et la mise en valeur du littoral) to protect coastal areas from development and real estate speculation and to develop free public access to coastal paths. In addition, certain instruments developed by the state have normative scope for local plans. At the junction of regional planning and land use planning, the territorial directives for sustainable development and planning (Directive territoriale pour l’aménagement et le Développement durable, DTADD) allow the state to supervise the production of local plans in certain areas that have specific environmental or social issues. The DTADD relates only to large areas whose delineation is not constrained by administrative boundaries. Through this plan, the state declares its intentions with regard to a given area and provides a framework for the plans produced by local authorities. However, while 22 DTADD were initially planned, only six were actually completed. The DTADD is therefore one of the legal provisions that are rarely used.

Secondly, national interventions have aimed to put new topics for urban policies on the agenda of local authorities (Douay et al. 2014). Examples include the reduction of car use in the city, social cohesion at the scale of agglomerations, water quality, landscape protection, the fight against air pollution, etc. The state has also developed a national policy for disadvantaged urban areas (politique de la ville) (Demazière/Sykes 2021). This urban policy consists of a set of measures taken by the French government to revitalise certain urban neighbourhoods known as ‘sensitive’ or ‘priority’ areas and to reduce social inequalities between regions. It is characterised by a comprehensive approach to problems, without separating urban, economic and social issues. It includes legislative and regulatory measures in the field of social action and urban planning, in partnership with local authorities and their partners (social landlords, economic circles, associations, etc.), often on a contractual basis. At the same time, the state issues regulations that are binding for local actors. For example, the Solidarity and Urban Renewal Act (Solidarité et Renouvellement Urbain, SRU) adopted in 2000 requires municipalities with more than 3,500 inhabitants to have at least 20% social housing. This proportion was increased to 25% in 2013.

Thirdly, national governments have created new planning tools for local authorities, with two main aims: to ensure that sustainable development principles are effectively taken into account at the local level and to contribute to a multi-level planning system. In this context, a new planning level emerged: the region.

At the end of the 1990s, i.e. 15 years after regions were created, the law created the Regional Plan for Sustainable Regional Planning and Development (Schéma régional d’aménagement et de développement durable du territoire, SRADDT). Developed and approved by regional councils, this forward-looking orientation document must describe the regional planning project. It must ensure that regional development projects are consistent with the policies of the state and the various local authorities where these policies have an impact on regional land use planning. The plan is intended to be a reference document for the regional authority for its policies. Depending on the interest shown by regional elected officials, the state of progress of the SRADDTs has been extremely variable. However, in 2015, the state persisted in entrusting the region with the elaboration of a Regional Plan for the Planning, Sustainable Development and Equality of Territories (Schéma Régional d’Aménagement, de Développement durable et d’Egalité des Territoires, SRADDET). Compared to the SRADDT, the SRADDET was expanded to include new environmental aspects: energy management and recovery, the fight against climate change, biodiversity protection, waste management, etc. Above all, the objectives of the SRADDET must be taken into account in local urban planning documents. In this way, the regions acquire normative power over the projects of other local authorities. For this reason, all the regions concerned have adopted a SRADDET (Béhar et al. 2021). 

Decentralisation laws have resulted in the transfer of the bulk of urban planning powers and thus of local planning to around 35,000 municipalities. This was extended to intermunicipal authorities by the Urban Solidarity and Renewal Act (loi Solidarité et Renouvellement Urbains, SRU) in 2000. The key elements are four instruments: the SCOT, PDU, PLH and PLU.

At the scale of a living area, the territorial coherence scheme (schéma de cohérence territoriale, SCOT) is the pivotal document of urban planning law. This new plan replaces the master plan (SD). It aims to define a shared project at the scale of one or several groupings of municipalities. As of 1 January 2020, France had more than 470 SCOTs covering 95% of the French population and 85% of municipalities. These figures reflect a real revival of spatial planning in France. The SCOT describes a project of a political nature. It is not an operational instrument that provides for actions, but it establishes a framework and constraints that ensure the conditions for carrying out actions. It includes: 

• a presentation report containing an assessment of the area and an environmental assessment;
• a development and sustainable development project which presents the strategic objectives and choices in terms of development and environmental protection;
• a document describing the orientations and objectives which establishes how the plan must be implemented.

The SCOT has a legal framework that all other urban planning documents (PLU, PDU, PLH, etc.) must comply with by way of compatibility. Compared to the former Schéma Directeur, the SCOT is less focused on land use and more on strategy and foresight (Douay et al. 2014). With an objective of territorial coherence, this plan must deal with the major balancing acts of development (extension/renewal/protection of nature areas), the social mix and the diversity of urban functions. It must also make it possible to better link urban planning and transport issues. The development of the SCOT is a concerted process between the EPCIs concerned, the state, the region, the department, but also representatives of the socio-economic sphere and associations. However, the realisation of the SCOT is made difficult by the size of the area under consideration. The perimeters can take very diverse forms with generally scores of municipalities of several groupings, but often have difficulty in taking into account the entirety of a functional urban region (Cremer-Schulte 2014). 

Since 1986, urban transport plans (Plan de déplacement urbain, PDU) have been mandatory documents in agglomerations of more than 100,000 inhabitants. They aim to improve the organisation of journeys and transport and reduce car use in the city. The PDU is drawn up by the urban transport authority, usually one (or more) intermunicipal authorities. The state, the region and the department are also involved in the process. Representatives of transport users, business and environmental associations may be consulted. PDUs should be compatible with DTADDs, SCOTs and regional air quality plans. Conversely, PLUs must be compatible with the PDU. This interdependence of documents shows that developing alternatives to the car necessarily involves collaboration between multiple actors in the fields of urban planning and public transport, but also roads and parking, as well as consultation with economic actors, associations and citizens. In practice, the trade-offs between the development of road and public transport infrastructure are not always easy (Desjardins 2020).

The local housing programme (Programme local de l’habitat, PLH) was part of the 1983 decentralisation law. At that time, it represented just one way for municipalities or intermunicipal bodies to define their housing priorities. The PLH became more extensive in 1991, when a law (Loi d’orientation pour la ville, LOV) imposed its development in conurbations with more than 200,000 inhabitants and with social housing amounting to less than 20% of the total housing stock. The PLH then became a plan to fight social segregation at the intermunicipal level. This orientation was reinforced in 2000 with the SRU law. With the National Housing Commitment Act adopted in 2006 (Loi d’engagement national pour le logement), the implementation of a PLH is mandatory for all EPCIs with more than 50,000 inhabitants and at least one municipality with more than 15,000 inhabitants.

In 2000, the SRU law transformed the land use plan (plan d’occupation des sols, POS) into a local urban plan (Plan local d’urbanisme, PLU) with the objective that municipalities define an urban project and not just zoning. The PLU must articulate the design and dimensions of an urban development project. Like the SCOT, the PLU has complex statutory objectives in terms of the diversity of functions and environmental protection. It is drawn up by local elected officials at the municipal or intermunicipal level. The PLUs must therefore arbitrate the at times conflicting interests of the actors in the area, whether institutional, economic or from civil society. 

The PLU includes a Sustainable Development and Development Project (Projet d’aménagement et de développement durable, PADD) and a by-law. The PADD sets out the EPCI’s or the municipality’s urban planning project and defines the general orientations of the policies for development, facilities, urban planning, the protection of natural, agricultural and forest areas, and the preservation or restoration of continuous ecological areas. It defines the general orientations of development and sets objectives to limit land take. The by-law sets the general rules and easements for land use. It is opposable by any public or private person for the execution of any works or construction. The by-law may in particular:

• specify the land use (nature of activities);
• define the rules relating to constructions and the external aspect of the constructions;
• specify, in urban areas, cultivated land to be protected and land which may not be used for construction;
• impose a minimum building density in areas close to existing and planned public transport.

The PLU must always be compatible with the SCOTs, PLHs and PDUs that are developed over larger areas. In most cases, the plan is carried out at the municipal level. However, the state now encourages its replacement by the PLUI, with the ‘I’ meaning intermunicipal. Since the 2015 law on the New Territorial Organisation of the Republic (loi portant sur la nouvelle organisation du territoire de la République, NOTRe), the development of a PLU is an intermunicipal responsibility. Unless a municipality objects, preparing a PLUI is mandatory for intermunicipal communities (EPCI). As of 1 January 2024, 418 PLUIs had been elaborated and approved, covering around 8,500 municipalities and 21% of the country by area. The PLUI covers a larger area than the PLU but it is also more integrative since it includes housing and transport planning guidelines, which are equivalent to the PLH and PDU respectively.

Alongside the SCOT and PLU, new planning tools have emerged in France to specifically address climate, energy, biodiversity and public health challenges. To meet these pressing environmental challenges and ensure a transition to sustainable energy use, lawmakers have introduced Territorial Climate-Air-Energy Plans (Plan Climat Air Energie Territorial, PCAET). Its aim is to ensure coherence between the various actions undertaken in the region by applying a ‘climate and energy’ filter to all decisions and policies, thus moving from fragmented, ad-hoc initiatives to a coherent, coordinated and ambitious climate and energy policy. Such a plan is mandatory for groupings of municipalities with over 20,000 residents. A PCAET serves both strategic and operational functions since the national policy assigns urban authorities a key coordinating role in climate action alongside municipalities, private and public stakeholders, and citizens. A PCAET is adopted following broad consultation and co-development with local actors. It generally covers issues such as public health, mobility, energy, public and green spaces, biodiversity, agriculture and the circular economy. To ensure better implementation, the objectives of the PCAET can be included in the Intermunicipal Local Urban Planning Scheme (PLUI) and integrated with other planning tools (Local Housing Plan, Urban Mobility Plan).

How plans are elaborated

In France, spatial planning was decentralised from the state to municipalities in 1982. Since then, and especially with the reform of the planning system in 2000, a new attitude to planning has emerged, featuring a willingness to develop a project-oriented approach (Douay et al. 2014). In addition to addressing such basic issues as the regulation of land use and aggregating sectoral policies such as housing, transport, business activities or other infrastructure, the SCOT and the PLU are also conceived as a process to anticipate the character and location of the key features of a place and to design the most efficient means for their realisation. However, France has nearly 35,000 municipalities, 84% of which have fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. This very large number of small municipalities results in local governments that lack planning capability and that autonomously make plans for such a small amount of land that there are inevitably incompatibilities and conflicts with adjacent municipalities. Furthermore, the ability of small municipalities to develop plans that comply with national laws and European directives that need to be respected is in doubt (Demazière 2018). Facing exogenous forces, such as international economic pressures or climate change, French spatial planning could be much more integrated and cross-disciplinary if more planning decisions were made at a higher level of government. This is the challenge of encouraging a greater use of SCOTs and PLUIs as mechanisms to connect the plans of individual municipalities. However, drawing up a SCOT requires dozens of mayors and hundreds of municipal councillors from a given city region to collectively define a spatial project on the scale of a very large area. Moreover, the plan has a time horizon of 10–15 years, which far exceeds the duration of a municipal electoral mandate (six years). The development of various planning documents relies on the work of many people – work that is not very visible. This includes conducting the necessary studies to inform decision-making, facilitating numerous meetings with elected officials and representatives from various public and private sectors, taking the time to consult with residents and even involving them in the process, designing documents, writing reports, creating maps and graphics, finding the most effective ways to communicate, and finally, ensuring that the plans are legally sound. All of this can make it difficult for local public actors to develop a plan with real strategic content. 

The concepts of ‘soft spaces’ (developed by Allmendinger and Haughton in 2009) and ‘soft planning’ did not receive much attention in France. But the researcher and consultant Martin Vanier (2008) coined the notion of inter-territoriality (interterritorialité) which draws on the fact that more and more areas have multiple functions in everyday life, be it residential, professional, recreational or service functions. Spatial planning has a role to play since the interconnections between these various areas can be facilitated by improvements in mobility and communication. Vanier (2008) also pleads for a reconfiguration of planning mechanisms to better coordinate and articulate the concerned actors and institutions. This approach assumes that the networked and cooperative dimension of territorial organisation will progressively prevail over the logics of division and fixed boundaries (Peyrony et al. 2022). The challenge is less to change the institutions’ legal or geographical perimeters – .e. to look for a ‘territorial optimum’ – but rather to improve their capacity to cooperate. This vision is particularly relevant in France, in a context of so-called ‘horizontal’ decentralisation in which the hierarchy between the different territorial authorities and their groupings remains weak. The inter-territorial approach applies to various planning contexts that must respond to a situation of ‘complexity’. In practice, there are various forms of inter-territorial dialogue and between the largest EPCIs (métropoles) and their surrounding regions, which allow the cities to address issues that extend beyond their immediate vicinity. For instance, about 20 metropolitan poles (pôles métropolitains) have arisen since 2010 (Demazière et al. 2022). They represent an alliance of a number of EPCIs, ranging from two intermunicipal bodies (Nîmes, Alès) up to 20 (Caen, Normandy) (Bariol-Mathais 2017). Such metropolitan poles create a network which works together to tackle inter-territorial problems and planning issues (Dugua 2015). This institutional form is valued by local actors as a ‘bouffée d’air frais’ (‘breath of fresh air’) as it offers more flexibility and opportunities for experimentation (Vanier 2017: 19). A metropolitan pole can assume responsibility for strategic planning on the level of metropolitan regions, as in the case of Nantes/Saint-Nazaire. where the metropolitan pole has developed the Schéma de cohérence territoriale.

In France, urban planning must now incorporate the ‘No Net Land Take’ (zero artificialisation nette, ZAN) objective. In 2018, a national biodiversity plan was published, which aims to limit the consumption of natural, agricultural and forested land in order to achieve zero net land consumption by 2050. To this end, urban planning and commercial development policies should be revised to promote more compact urban development. However, the NNLT objective does not enjoy a broad consensus in France. On the one hand, the technical measurements of land development vary depending on the methods used. On the other hand, in a metropolitan city-region, to concentrate all new construction in the immediate vicinity of the main city (urban containment) or to distribute it across the surrounding smaller rural municipalities (decentralised densification) may yield uncertain results regarding car travel needs, residents’ exposure to air pollution, and other factors (Mignot et al. 2009). Thus, the ‘no net land take’ objective is still far from achieving consensus in France (Desjardins 2020), and not all plans are willingly upholding it. France illustrates that ‘the planning system context – that is, the legal and administrative structures – does not define planning activities completely. At most, it specifies corridors of action within which planning practice can move’ (Reimer et al. 2014: 5). Even though the principles of sustainable development have been adopted in legislation and in the constitution, the drafting of urban development plans still reflects local understandings, priorities and practices. The gap between the French legislator’s intention and common planning practice is not minor. 

To describe and explain local variations in urban planning practices, the approach of ‘planning cultures’ has garnered considerable interest within the field of urban planning over the past twenty years (Friedmann 2005; Booth 2009; Othengrafen/Knieling 2016). Cultural approaches to planning aim to move beyond the implicit dichotomy between planning systems (the legal and institutional frameworks that govern planning activities) and planning practices (the concrete, observable and culturally specific ways in which land-use planning is implemented, resulting in particular urban forms). This cultural approach adopts a relational perspective, encouraging the consideration of institutions and practices as a continuous and constantly evolving process of negotiation (Purkarthofer et al. 2021). The planning culture in France has been studied mainly from the outside, notably by Philip Booth, then professor in spatial planning at the University of Sheffield, and also founder of the French British Planning Study Group. Booth (2005) has argued that French planning cannot be understood except in the context of the constitutional arrangements, the legal framework and a culture of decision-making which are specific to the country and are a product of its history. He even argued that ‘the tools of the French system, for all their apparent similarities with other planning systems, have specific purposes which derive from cultural understandings about the nature of government and decision-making’ (Booth 2009: 678). Reflecting on the planning reform of the 2000s, which introduced new planning instruments such as the PLU and the SCOT, he argued that ‘a stated objective of simplifying planning and the administrative structures of planning appears to lead almost invariably to greater complexity’ (Booth 2009: 692). In summary, even though the SRU law proposed an ordered hierarchy of plans which nominally simplifies the process of making coherent spatial policy, in practice the relationship between different planning instruments  (PLU, SCOT, SRADDET, etc.) has become increasingly complex (Lerousseau 2017; Desjardins 2020; Doré 2023).

In France, the first curriculum in spatial planning appeared in 1919, with the creation of the School of Advanced Urban Studies, which later became the Paris Institute of Urban Planning. Half a century elapsed before new urbanism training institutes appeared within French universities. This happened in 1969 in Aix-en-Provence, Science Po Paris and Tours. In the 1970s, similar curricula were introduced in Grenoble, Brest, Bordeaux, Toulouse, etc. In 1984, these institutions founded the Association for the Promotion of Education and Research in Planning and Urbanism (Association pour la Promotion de l’Enseignement et de la Recherche en Aménagement et Urbanisme, APERAU). A major motivation of the founders was to distinguish the urban planning curricula that are truly interdisciplinary and that combine theories and professional practices from other single-discipline academic curricula that claim to be in the same field. 

It should be added that urban planning has become a university discipline, with the creation in 1992 of a ‘Spatial Planning and Urban Planning’ section within the National Council of Universities. Lecturers and researchers in this discipline have sought to structure the urban planning education.

APERAU currently has 22 members in France which offer Bachelor and Master programmes. It has set up a Charter of Education Quality that promotes interdisciplinarity, the participation of professional urban and spatial planners in the training curriculum, job placements, etc. Recognised by the ministry responsible for spatial planning, the Charter is the basis for the assessment of planning curricula that wish to uphold it. The assessment is conducted by teams of academics and professionals, including a representative from the Professional Qualification Office of Urban Planners (Office Professionnel de Qualification des Urbanistes, OPQU). 

In practice, each planning school has close relationships with professionals from the field, who give lectures, are integrated into the teaching staff as associate professors, who sponsor practical workshops based on real case studies, and who participate in an advancement board. As a result, the university curricula in urbanism and planning are fully acknowledged by professionals in the field. Thus, the report of Senator Pierre Jarlier (2012) on urbanism within local government states that ‘Over the last twenty years, the planning institutes represent the best possible qualification for those who wish to enter the planning profession […]. The urban planners that graduate from the university institutes of urbanism and that work in the field have skills in almost all areas defined by the Professional Qualification Office of Urban Planners in its repository, and according to the prerogatives of local authorities in the field of urbanism and local planning. These professionals bring their broad vision of the city and urban areas to bear through spatial analysis and forecasting, project management and communication with the public. They are also able to implement projects and to adapt them to the regulatory conditions’ (Jarlier 2012: 73–74). 

Booth, P. (2009): Planning and the Culture of Governance: Local Institutions and Reform in France. In: European Planning Studies 17(5), 677–695.

Cremer-Schulte, D. (2014): With or Without You? Strategic Spatial Planning and Territorial Re-Scaling in Grenoble Urban Region. In: Planning Practice and Research 29(3), 287–301.

Demazière, C. (2018): Strategic spatial planning in a situation of fragmented local government: the case of France. In: disP – The Planning Review 54(2), no. 213, 56–74.

Geppert, A. (2014): France, Drifting Away from the ‘Regional Economic’ Approach. In: Reimer, M.; Getimis, P.; Blotevogel, H.H. (eds) (2014): Spatial Planning Systems and Practices in Europe. London, 109–126. 

Geppert, A. (2015): Planning without a spatial development perspective? The case of France. In: Knapp, G.; Nedovic-Budic, Z.; Carbonell, A. (eds.): Planning for States and Nation / States: a TransAtlantic Exploration. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 381–410.

Gustedt, E.; Grabski-Kieron, U.; Demazière, C.; Paris, D. (eds.) (2022): Cities and Metropolises in France and Germany. Hannover. = Forschungsberichte der ARL 20.