How To Integrate Social And EnvironmentalAspects In Housing And Urban Policies:Some Experiences From France And Germany

Since the end of the twentieth century, most French and German cities have set up sustainable urban policies. In the past, German urban policies have progressively integrated environmental aspects while in France they have focussed on social issues. Today, the major stakes of urban evolution lead urban actors to reconsider the articulation between social and environmental aspects. A comparative analysis of six cities shows that they are currently experimenting with initiatives in order to achieve local priority objectives: these “good practices” are related to land use control, planning methods, transversal approaches, and citizen participation. However, the simultaneous analysis of obstacles shows that these initiatives are slowed down by administrative inertia, a lack of shared knowledge of “sustainable development” and the ambiguous status of citizen participation in relation to representative democracy.