Urban design as a cultural expression: Emergence of new practices in the Paris Region since the 1960s.

Urban design as a cultural expression : the emergence of

new practices in the Paris Region since the 1960s.

Chun-Liang YEH
Joint Centre for Urban Design, Department of Planning
Oxford Brookes University, jclyeh@brookes.ac.uk
Phone: +44-1-865484203 / Fax/ +44-1-865483298

Keywords: urban design; maîtrise d’oeuvre urbaine; projet urbain; secteur; connection.

1. Introduction
The overall aim of the article is to explicate the cultural dimension of urban place-making through the analysis of
two examples in France in the last four decades.

Three objectives are to be achieved here. The first is to examine the new professional practices emerging in the
two operations of urban development in Cergy-Pontoise and in Paris-Bercy. The second is to analyse the
construction of new professional identities and roles of the architects and urban planners among other
professionals implied by these operations. The third is to interrogate the relationships between the new
professional culture and the broader context of the social production of space, attempting thus a definition of the
urban place-making as a cultural expression.

As a contribution to knowledge, the article proposes a conceptual framework, adaptable to different national
contexts, allowing practitioners, researchers and policy makers to better assess the values and ideologies
embodied in the urban planning and design practices in different countries, for these are crucial for the capacity
of planning systems to respond actively to the constraints and opportunities of an enlarged Europe.

2. New professional practices of urban development in the Paris Region :

Two examples

2.1 National context for urban planning and design

In their analysis of the urban planning systems in European countries, Newman and Thornley distinguished five
“families” of legal and administrative structures (1996). One of them, originating in France and labelled the
Napoleonic family, refers to the planning style that uses legal norms, or the codification of abstract principles, to
reflect in advance on matters of land use patterns and aspects of built forms (Newman & Thornley 1996; 31).
This frame of thinking is particularly compatible with plan-led, legally binding development plans. On the
administrative level, the French system is characterised by the persistence of the commune as the basic building
block of local governments, working with the strong central authorities in Paris. The articulation between the
central and local administrations has been elaborate to diverse degrees in different periods, but the dual character
of the system remains distinct through time.

With this perspective, the making of the present urban planning system can be roughly depicted with three
important dates :
- the 1943 law on urbanism, with the creation of the Ministry of Reconstruction and urbanism. It established the
centralised character of French physical planning for the subsequent forty years. It provided the legal basis for
the design and delivery of mass housing schemes (grands ensembles), as well as the comprehensive urban
redevelopment schemes (rénovations urbaines) in the 1950s-1960s;
- the 1967 law on land use planning (Loi d’orientation foncière) established a two-tier system of plans : the
regional plans (schémas directeurs d’aménagement et d’urbanisme) and the statutory local development plans

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Urban design as a cultural expression: Emergence of new practices in the Paris Region since the 1960s.

(POS, or plans d’occupation des sols). It introduced the procedure of urban development zones (ZAC, or zone
d’aménagement concerté) as a correction of the planning and design policies of the previous period;
- the 1983 law of decentralisation further defined the competence of each administrative level in elaborating and
implementing these plans. The 2000 law SRU on social coherence and urban renewal (Loi de solidarité et
renouvellement urbain) identified new priorities for these plans without changing radically the structure (Merlin
1995, 2002).

Within these legal and administrative frameworks that evolved in the changing political and economic context,
governments of different levels accommodated their respective agendas and delivered strategic urban projects of
various spatial scales and programmes in partnership with the private sector. Among the specificities of the
French urban planning and design system, at least two characteristics can be considered relevant in explaining
the resulting built forms in the urban areas in France. The first is the importance of the political leaders assuming
the role of “maire-stratège” 1 in initiating strategic projects that give shape to parts of the city in terms of
architecture and urban form. The second is the relative lack of development plans at the neighbourhood scale2,
granting architects the legal and moral legitimacy to dominate the design of urban forms. As the French
practitioner and historian of urbanism Pierre Merlin put it :
This dimension of urban studies is often poorly apprehended in French urbanism – for example, in the new
towns – obviously due to the lack of a tradition comparable to the Anglo-Saxon approach of “urban design”.
(Merlin 1995; 76)

2.2 Cergy-Pontoise and the concept of maîtrise d'oeuvre urbaine

The site of Cergy-Pontoise

Cergy-Pontoise is one of the five new towns created in the Paris region in late 1960s. It is located 30 km north-
west of the capital city. Eleven townships were involved in this urban development operation, covering an area
of 8000 ha. Its population grew from 40000 inhabitants in 1968 to 180 000 in 2000. Today it houses 4000
companies and offers 85 000 jobs.

The first urban centre to be constructed in Cergy-Pontoise was the Prefecture quarter, delivered in 1970 with
housing and accompanying public services and a regional shopping centre. The second urban centre, called
Cergy-Saint-Christophe was intended by the urban planners to be the “real” or long-term centre of the new town.
Delivered in 1984, it dominates the loop of the river Oise.

The context of the development of the concept “maîtrise d’oeuvre urbaine”

The end of the 1950s saw the ultimate development of the unchallenged dogma of Modernist urbanism,
embodied in the mass public housing schemes building on the radically place-based programmes of the delivery
of neighbourhood services known as the Grille Dupont3. The first public development corporation (EPA, or
Etablissement public d’aménagement) was created in 1958 for the development of the area of La Défense, to the
West of the historic centre of Paris, into a business district. The development plans defining the construction
locations and volumes, called “plan de masse”, were elaborated by the chief architects of the corporation
inspired by the principles promoted in the Charte d’Athènes.

In this context, the creation of urban centres in the new towns, guided by the ambitious 1965 Paris Regional
Plan, was an occasion to test the viability of institutional and architectural innovations. In its earliest stage in
1968, British urban planners were invited by the EPA of Cergy-Pontoise to contribute to the elaboration of
planning briefs (Hirsch 2000). This experience encouraged the urban planners of Cergy-Pontoise to attempt a
more creative planning attitude. The association AUSP (Architecture urbanisme et service public), led by
Bertrand Warnier and Jean-Marie Duthilleul, was created in 1979. (Charre 2003; 59).

The association identified the gap between the legal authority of urban planners and the mission they were
demanded to accomplish : giving shape to the new town and endowing it with a “cultural identity” (EPA Cergy
1989). The physical design of urban centres was then of highly symbolic importance, and the urban planners

1
Newman & Thornley 1996, p.165. The expression is from Padioleau & Demesteere (1992). The maire-stratège acts as the
hub of local economic and political interests.
2
The protection plans of historic areas introduced by the 1962 law (Loi Malraux) followed by other similar laws in the 1980s,
and the planning brief for the urban development zones (PAZ , or plan d’aménagement de zone) are the few examples.
3
Cf. the periodical Urbanisme n°62-63, 1959.

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claimed a new set of working ethics and competences to achieve this goal, summarised in the term of maîtrise
d'oeuvre urbaine which is translated by its initiators into “urban planning and design”.

The experimental development of the practice of maîtrise d’oeuvre urbaine in Cergy-Pontoise has been
supported by the summer workshops organised by the EPA in partnership with the geography department of the
University of Cergy-Pontoise since 1982. These annual workshops engage international young professionals and
mature students who, with the approach of maîtrise d'oeuvre urbaine, reflect on different issues of urban
development and management for the sites in the Paris region and abroad. The proposals of urban planning and
design produced in team work are then assessed by professionals and representatives of local authorities.

As another demonstration of the approach of maîtrise d'oeuvre urbaine at work, the site of Axe Majeur (Major
Axis), composed of a series of buildings and places dominating the loop of the river Oise, was imagined and
constructed in an innovative process. With the sponsorship of the Ministry of the Culture as well as the private
sector in the new town, the artist Dani Karavan was invited in 1980 to work with the urban planners of the EPA,
and defined the physical features of the site in an early stage in close collaboration with the architect Ricardo
Bofill who designed the circular building as part of the artistic composition of the site (Restany 1987).

The content of the concept “maîtrise d’oeuvre urbaine”

The conference organised by the association AUSP in the Senate House in Paris on the 27th January 1982
provided the condition of debate among politicians and professionals on the inaugural “charter” of maîtrise
d'oeuvre urbaine. The Ministry of Urbanism, Housing and Transportations also ordered a research report on the
theme carried out by the Institut d’Architecture et d’Urbanisme de Strasbourg in 1985. The EPA of Cergy-
Pontoise planned to organise an international conference in 1985 on the comparison between the approach of
maîtrise d’oeuvre urbaine and the Anglo-Saxon practices of urban design, but the event didn’t take place.

In his presentation in the conference of 1982, J.M. Duthilleul ruled out what maîtrise d'oeuvre urbaine is not. It
is not aesthetic control or decorations applied to urban engineering works. Its application is not limited to public
owned spaces and properties. It does not aim at designing the entire city as a predetermined Utopia. It is not an
autonomous discipline situated between urban planning and architecture. Instead, it is “a creative approach
allowing, at the scale of the city or the country, the passage from objectives or myths to the reality of the
everyday life of all the inhabitants, the reality of the neighbourhood, the street, the place or the park, even the
landscape.” (Duthilleul 1982; 3)

Alain Charre, professor and specialist in the history and cultures of architecture, developed the theoretical
content of the concept of maîtrise d'oeuvre urbaine in the terms of design, creation, and advice. By design, the
approach claims to reflect on the built environment of the city at a regional scale, conceiving it as a whole
without denying its complexity and contradictions. By creation, it puts forward the fact that the production of
physical and spatial layout receiving the buildings involves in itself creative efforts in interpreting the past and
imagining the future. By advice, it aims at establishing a new relationship with contracting authorities where
visions on the urban development, inspired by the local cultural identity, may precede and inform the
commissions from political leaders for the creation of urban places (Charre 2003).

2.3 Paris-Bercy and the concept of projet urbain

The term of projet urbain has been used and interpreted by different actors of urban development in the last
decades in France. This section attempts a critical synthesis of these interpretations, with the case of urban
development at Paris Bercy as a representative example of its application.

The context of the development of the concept of projet urbain

The decade of the 1990s saw the multiplication of “urban projects” (projets urbains) as the mode of urban
development succeeding to the “urbanism of operations” in the 1960s and 1970s characterised by its rigid frames
in terms of juridical, technical and spatial divisions (Eleb-Harlé 2000). To what extend the development of this
approach was encouraged by the Grands projets4 of the President François Mitterrand in the 1980s is open to
debate, but both approaches do share the planning culture supporting the “urbanism by projects” for the reasons

4
The Grands projets, including the Pyramid of the Louvres, and the Grande Arche in La Défense, are in fact architectural
projects characterised by the creation of a monumental public building which alters the perception and usage of a wider area
in its urban setting. Cf. François Chaslin 1985.

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exposed in the section 2.1. In the context of exacerbated competition for international investment capital, urban
projects are driven by local and regional political leaders in France as a powerful means of improving the image
of the city, with with the creation of urban places or with mere market-oriented communications on the theme.

On the institutional level, the General Directorate for town planning, housing and building of the Ministry of
Construction has been publishing a bulletin of information on projets urbains 5 since 1993. The research
department of the Ministry, Plan Construction Architecture, published a report of observations and reflections
on the actors and processes of projets urbains in Europe (Bonnet 1997). The Urban Strategy Programme
(“mission Projet urbain”) under of the Ministry organises also regular conferences and seminars on the theme
with international scholars and practitioners leading to the publication of a synthesis of the French practices
(Masboungi 2002).

The content of the concept of projet urbain

Empirically, the discussions on the notion of Projet urbain in France are led in two distinct perspectives. The
first consists in examining a selection of operations of urban development and identifying the common features
of these operations in terms of organisation and process (Eleb-Harlé 2000, Masboungi 2002). In this perspective,
urban projects are understood as a comprehensive strategic thinking for the urban development, covering its
political, economic, social and physical dimensions. Sensitive to the concerns of the contracting local authorities,
this approach sees the projet urbain as a powerful means of elaborating a communicable “vision” of the
development of the city on the political, economic and social level, before engaging a chief architect to
“translate” the vision into built forms by way of construction or of design prescriptions and recommendations.
What happens in reality is certainly more complex, with iterations between these two phases, but this version of
projet urbain implies that the qualities of urban places are not to be judged independently of the vision of the
city for which they are designed.

The second perspective consists in analysing the morphological components of spaces in the city and the logic of
their production, before proposing the reflected modes of their production and creation (Devillers 1994, Panerai
and Mangin 1999). Contrasting with the programme-oriented and area-specific way of thinking mentioned
earlier, which sees the creation of urban places primarily as a symbolic action for the city, this version of projet
urbain is more focused on the delivery of sensual lived experience of urban places for people. It draws upon the
experience of urban architecture of the Italian architects including Saverio Muratori and Aldo Rossi in the 1950s
and 1960s, as well as that of the Catalonian architect Manuel de Solà-Morales in Barcelona in the 1970s. Taking
into consideration the specific professional cultures of politicians, technicians, architects and urban planners in
France, and drawing lessons from the experiences of mass housing schemes and new towns in the previous
decades, the French approach of projet urbain works with the existing logic of ordinary constructions centred on
the design of “plots” (Panerai and Mangin 1999; 25). In so doing, it claims to enhance the capacity of the
resulting built forms in generating urban places adaptable to new programmes in the future.

The site of Paris-Bercy

The urban development zone “ZAC Paris-Bercy” was created by the city of Paris in 1987 on an area formerly
occupied by wine storehouses that closed down gradually in the 1970s. The city aimed at creating a new quarter
“with its proper identity and fitting into the existing street layouts” (Paris Projet n°27-28). The development plan
(PAZ) divided the area in three zones of different functions : the 13-hecta park, the 1400 unit housing blocs
facing the park, and commerce.

The development corporation of this part of the city, Semaest, assigned Jean-Pierre Buffi as the “architect-
coordinator” (architecte coordonnateur) in charge of elaborating the planning brief to be applied to the housing
blocs standing on the 400 meter long park frontage. The housing blocs are divided into plots on which buildings
are designed by different architects in accordance with the brief as a set of “rules of the game”, featuring notably
the plot-layout, and the continuous balconies from one plot to another. The operation was accomplished in 1997.

5
Cf. website http://www.urbanisme.equipement.gouv.fr/publi/default.htm

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3. New professional identity and roles in urban place-making in France

The two examples of urban development - Cergy-Pontoise and Paris-Bercy - and the two approaches of urban
planning and design - maîtrise d’oeuvre urbaine and projet urbain - exposed above do not pretend to show the
whole range of the changing configurations of professions in the process. Sociologists, landscapists, artists,
geographers, animateurs … are increasingly involved according to the specific needs of different development
requirements (Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, 2000). However, they do offer a pertinent frame of reference
for reflections on the new professional identities and roles of architects and urban planners in urban place-
making in France.

3.1 The projet urbain and the architects

In both approaches of projet urbain exposed in the previous section, the architect is placed at the centre of the
process of urban place-making. In the first approach where projet urbain is understood as urban development
strategy, the notion of “architect-coordinator” is developed empirically by the agency of urbanism of Paris
(APUR, or Atelier Parisien d’urbanisme) for the design and delivery of urban development zones by the end of
1980s. The architect-coordinator is a mediator between the contracting authority - the city for instance - and the
different developers and their respective architects of a site. On the one hand, the contracting authority may wish
to impose certain physical features on the future constructions, in the name of the “public interest” and the
promotion of the image of the city or the quarter. On the other hand, the developers may claim for the freedom to
employ original architectural styles to maximise their profit. The architect-coordinator then acts as a “translator”
of the will of the contracting authority into acceptable “rules of the game” for the architects working for the
developers. He must be an architect himself and capable of designing buildings, but he must also remain neutral
in this coordination process by not designing any particular buildings in the operation (Chadoin 2000).

In the second approach of projet urbain, Christian Devillers (1994) stresses the incremental nature of urban
place-making process, and the importance of the culture of architects in this process. Architects work on
continuous improvements of the urban environment with a creative and poetic dimension, not applications of
total technical solutions to the “needs” of abstract people with the misplaced ambition of social engineering.
Devillers observed the destruction of urban places with the dominance of the mode of production of abstract
spaces, and criticised this latter as the “logic of secteur” characterised by the division and fragmentation of
spaces based exclusively on juridical and technical considerations. With the awareness of projet urbain as a
pertinent response to the phenomenon, and the necessary institutional reforms, he urged architects to make
meaningful “urban place” an operational concept and a goal in itself, to which the juridical and technical
constraints must be subjected.

3.2 The maîtrise d’oeuvre urbaine and the urban planners

In the common language, the maîtrise d’oeuvre (project management) designates the architect commissioned by
a client to design the building(s) according to the needs and taste of the latter. By qualifying the object of design
as “urban”, the term oeuvre urbaine (urban fabric) introduces a range of possible interpretations on the identity
of professionals in urban place-making, and particularly that of urban planners.

While the theoretical validity of comparing the urban fabric to works of art is open to debate, the notion of
oeuvre urbaine can be seen as reflecting the cultural context of the 1980s where the functionalist and rationalist
style of architecture and urban planning were severely criticised by the post-modern movement and rhetoric
(Charre 2003; 21). Interests in varied urban forms per se, detached from any immediate social objective, were
gradually recognised as legitimate. The artists appeared then as pertinent actors mediating between the “cultural
identity” of a city or a region and its built forms. The involvement of artists in urban place-making is supported
by the programme of public commissions driven by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication since
the 1980s. Monique Faux, then counsellor for artistic affairs in the new towns in the Paris region, expressed the
vision of the city as the place for the “synthesis of the arts”, or the “decompartmentalising of forms of creation”:
… a new profile of the artist, regarded as a dependable partner, capable of humanising the city and giving it
an identity, began to take shape in the minds … (Faux 1992; 6)

For the urban planners promoting the notion of maîtrise d’oeuvre urbaine, the involvement of artists in urban
place-making has strategic implications. It not only allowed challenging the legitimacy of architects as the only
competent profession in the design and delivery of urban places, but it also helped urban planners to enlarge their

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Urban design as a cultural expression: Emergence of new practices in the Paris Region since the 1960s.

domain of competence in becoming the maître of the oeuvre urbaine, although the latter remains a pluri-
disciplinary competence and not to be identified with any particular profession.

4. Professional cultures and social production of space

“How to deal with environmental questions is, at heart, a cultural issue.” (Meller 1997; 2). While it is beyond the
scope of the present paper to tackle the extensive question of cultural identities and built environments, it does
attempt to address the issue of cultural specificity in urban place-making in France, where the term “culture” is
taken in its widest meaning encompassing the changing norms of modern society expressed through the “shared
codes of understanding, communication and practice that set one of many contexts for human thought and
action.” (Anderson & Gale 1992; 3)

4.1 Culture of the planning and design communities

Myriads of actors can be considered as part of the urban planning and design community, including politicians,
economists, investors, producers like architects and planners, and user groups, etc. This paper focuses on the
changing professional identities of architects and urban planners in France as a mode of investigation that can be
applied to other actors. There are also different ways of investigating the professional cultures of architects and
urban planners: while the sociological approach using the concept of habitus is shown to yield convincing
findings (Hillier & Rooksby 2002), the approach of institutional analysis allows the interpretation of corporative
structures and the role and respect accorded to the established professions, using the notions of legitimacy
(Healey & Williams 1993, Hall & Taylor 1996).

It is in this perspective that the two examples of urban development in the Paris region exposed above provide
keys to understanding the force of arguments in current debates in the moving landscape of professional bodies
and training institutions in urban place-making in the past decade in France6. As an illustration of these debates,
doubts were expressed ironically on whether the “Grand prix de l’urbanisme”, re-established by the Ministry of
Construction in 1998, deserves its name or should be renamed the “Grand prix du projet urbain” - assimilated to
the Anglo-Saxon “urban design” - given that the majority of the nominees design and deliver pieces of the city
and assume the authorship of the built physical environment like an architect (Belliot 2004). Here the tension
between the professional identities of urban planners and architects is tangibly communicated in the term projet
urbain highlighting a new category of reflection: the making of urban places.

The conceptualisation of projet urbain and maîtrise d’oeuvre urbaine is thus part of the intellectual ground
underpinning the legitimation of new approaches and practices with regard to established ones. In this
legitimation, urban place-making as a cultural expression gain increasing audience and credibility. In fact,
raising the issue of urban place-making with regard to the French tradition of “urbanisme” or architecture that
does not recognise the unitary lived experience of “place” (lieu) as a working concept requires this intellectual
effort of re-framing and a long-term process of confrontation and consensus-building.

4.2 Culture embedded in the social production of space and places

According to the thesis of Henri Lefebvre, the representation of “space” in a society is informed and, at the same
time, structures the particular social relations of production and the reproduction of these social relations in that
society (Lefebvre 1974). In this perspective, the singular absence of political and intellectual interests in France
in analysing the making of urban places as an important medium of the “social space” defended by Lefebvre
against the modern “abstract space”, deserves questioning. While urban theorists (Lynch 1960, 1972) and human
geographers (Relph 1976, Tuan 1977) explored the features of the experience of places, observations on the
practice of everyday life highlight the fact that lived experiences in metropolitan areas interrogated the
traditional representation of place-based urban realm (Webber 1964, de Certeau 1984, Soja 2000). The theme of
the society of networks and lifestyle urbanism stimulated abundant literatures on the organisation of urban
spaces and places based on the consideration of individual mobility (Castells 1996, Urry 2000).

6
To identify the relevant elements in the, some clues may be found in the publications: Les Annales de la recherche urbaine
n°88, 2000 and Urbanisme n°335, 2004, while others can be traced in significant events including the transfer of the tutelary
authority of the schools of architecture from the Ministry of Construction to the Ministry of Culture and Communication in
2000, and the seminars on the emergence of new professions after forty years’ experience of French new towns embedded in
the inter-ministerial research programme led by Jean-Eudes Roullier since 1999.

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Urban design as a cultural expression: Emergence of new practices in the Paris Region since the 1960s.

Against this cultural background, the post-modern analysis of space-time perception challenged the static and
hierarchical representation of the historic centre of the city as places with high symbolic values contrasted with
the undifferentiated peripheries that would be devoid of them. With this regard David Harvey examined the
social process by which place is constructed through activities of representation or narrative on its identity and
particularities. He established an antagonism between space and place by the assertion that “oppositional
movements are generally better at organising in and dominating place than are at commanding space” (Harvey
1993; 24)

This overview leads to the conclusion that the representation of space and places in a society is not value-free.
Consequently, how a society produces and delivers urban places on the basis of that representation is to a large
extent a cultural issue, not a technical one.

4.3 Urban place-making as a cultural expression

The definitions given above on the professional culture in urban place-making, on the one hand, and the culture
in a broader sense reflected in the social production of space, on the other hand, are intended to support the
conceptual framework proposed in this paper where the two cultures are seen in a dialectical relationship. The
discourses and images produced in a cultural sphere influence, and are influenced by, those in the other sphere.
In the French case seen through two examples of urban development and their theoretical underpinning and
implications, the present paper argues that the articulation between the two cultural spheres is operated by the
notions of “secteur” and “connection” (Devillers 1988, Choay 2003).

The logic of secteur can be understood as a mode of representation and production of urban space and “none-
places” dominated exclusively by the juridical and technical considerations. This apparently neutral organisation
of space can however be shown to present affinity with the political movement of Saint Simon School in the
1830s and share some elements of its ideology (Offner 1996, Picon 2002). Applied in urbanism, it erodes the
building block patterns and gives rise to self-contained secteurs - many of which are privately managed - and
interrupted public spaces (Mangin 2000, 2004). As for the idea of connection, it is regarded here as a form of
adaptation of the logic of secteur to the constraints of globalisation. It allows also accounting for the evolution of
the broader cultural sphere in France in contact with the global world where alternative values circulate from one
country to another.

5. Conclusion

The French practice and thinking on urban place-making, analysed through the professional reconfiguration and
represented by the approaches of projet urbain and maîtrise d’oeuvre urbaine, are here described as responsive
to the wider cultural environment and its social production of space, via the notions of secteur and connection.

The author of this paper pursues the consolidation of the conceptual framework which is expected to be
adaptable to other national contexts in Europe. The proposition that the notion of “community” represents the
key to understanding the urban place-making as a cultural expression in the UK is part of this effort (Delanty
2003).

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Edward W. Soja (2000), Postmetropolis: Critical studies of cities and regions. Oxford : Blackwell.
Yi-Fu Tuan (1977). Space and Place : The perspective of experience. London : Edward Arnold
John Urry (2000). Sociology beyond Societies : Mobilities for the twenty-first century. London : Routledge.
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University of Pennsylvania.

Journal articles

Belliot M. (2004). Planners contre designers ? Urbanisme n°334. 198-200

Chadoin O. (2000). L’architecte coordonnateur entre originalité et ordre. Les Annales de la recherche urbaine.
n°88, dec. 2000. 63-72.
Devillers C., (1988). De la logique de secteur au projet urbain. Villes en parallèle, n°12-13. 244-259.
Duthilleul J.M. (1982). La maîtrise d’ouvrage urbaine, de la programmation vers la conception. Conference
paper. 27 January 1982, Paris.
Hall P.A. & Taylor R. (1996), Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms. Political Studies, XLIV,
936-957.
Healey P. & Williams R. (1993). European Urban Planning Systems : Diversity and convergence. Urban Studies
30(4/5): 701-720.
Mangin D., (2000). Urbanisme de secteur, architectures de produits. Les Annales des Ponts et Chaussées. n°93.
Offner J.M. (1996). « Réseaux » et « Large Technical System » : concepts complémentaires ou concurrents ?
Flux, n°26, 17-30.
Padioleau J.G. & Demesteere R. (1992). Les démarches stratégiques de planification des villes. Les Annales de
la Recherche Urbaine, n°51.
Paris Projet n° 27-28 (1987)

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