“Today, it is the environment that guides us”

The Agence d'urbanisme has changed a lot in 20 years, to the point of reaching the age of maturity in 2024 “at the right time for the territories”, as Thierry Albertini, mayor of La Valette-du-Var and president of the institution, asserts. In 20 years, while keeping its fundamentals in the background, what has changed in the awareness of the need for proper planning is the collective interest, according to Thierry Albertini. “The agency has diversified across a wide spectrum of studies that elected officials are increasingly seizing, pushed by their services in the face of growing needs.”

THINKING COLLECTIVELY

The mayor of La Valette adds: “Paradigms are changing all the faster as needs accelerate, correlated with climate-related degradation. Today, it is the environment that guides us, and the agency helps us more than ever to understand, to move forward, to project ourselves, and to decide.” Concretely, Audat is a factory for decision-making support and sharing the challenges of public policies. “It is not about pleasing, but about opening up the field of possibilities, the options to follow or not, the consequences of our actions. Given the impacts, all this food for thought is strategic,” insists the vice-president of TPM. On the ground, it is a matter of thinking collectively about complementary elements, themselves also evolving, which, gathered together, make up the territory of Var.

In conjunction with urban planning, which is part of the transversality of its missions, Thierry Albertini highlights the agency's spatial planning engineering: “Planning is the future, it is thinking about the future to adjust in a coherent way. Without this reflection on the scale of different, global territories, there is no salvation. It is essential for the development of our cities, our living areas, our department, and beyond. The agency is evolving intelligently across all complexities, from the existing to the prospective, taking into consideration the history and identity of each. The work of its experts also consists in knowing how to adapt to varied, even unique, issues to avoid non-urban planning, while knowing how to take political will into account.”

CONSECRATING THE PERI-URBAN

For his part, Philippe Mahé, préfet du Var, an excellent expert in planning issues and the added value of urban planning agencies, has a precise view of the agency's role: “I expect it to make us reflect on the major developments of the territory, on internal migration, on perceptions of potential divides, on the risks of tomorrow, successes, skills. In short, to pull everyone upwards.” According to the State representative: “The agency can rehabilitate the act of building, which is essential to meet demands, play a unique role in meeting challenges by creating a framework for exchanges between territories, by encouraging local actors to think long term, to project themselves, to anticipate planning issues, etc.” To achieve this, the préfet insists: “We must go beyond all the fantasies between rural and urban, and establish the place of the peri-urban. We need an ecosystem of experts from diverse backgrounds who restore truths and make it possible to control developments.” A diagnosis shared by Thierry Albertini: “The elected official of today, and especially of tomorrow, is a business leader who must build their project, master their subjects, because everything is longer, likely to be challenged, delayed.” “To build the city on the city, stop sprawling, agree well on priority transitions, the agency is, in my eyes, the right level to move forward sustainably. At 20 years old, do we not have the future ahead of us!”