Hello, we are going to discuss density, urban form, and compact cities of present day. We are going to discuss what the English call "pattern". And we are going to see what are the choices that must be made when we want to design or plan the city. There are three possibilities to fit into an existing urban structure. Here is a city I'm drawing very quickly. Here it is with a center. Regardless, the first possibility is to actually intensify the fringes, okay, to open, of course some new areas. But we will try to build to the max the city within the city. Second possibility, let me go back quickly to my drawing. The second opportunity to implement, the city center is further intensified by building the city within the city but on the outskirts new areas are developed for the new future populations. It can be just about anywhere but it is no longer desirable to have density but rather a spread and then we continue to build the city like that. Know that this is the drawing being used the majority of the time. Finally, the third possibility is the creation satellites, new and future centers which then become, without doubt, the new centers of the future that will maybe have to be intensified. So there they are, the three ways to arrive at being inserted into the existing urban structure. Regardless of being by an intensification of the existing city, or by an implementation in the outskirts of new plots of land, or by multiplying the satellites, the city satellites. The first solution is without a doubt the best one, the one which we use 99% of the time is the second solution. What is density? Two possibilities. It is the development density or population density. Development density is not of great interest to us. This is more of a day to day. Why? Because we realize that there are changes in the social structures. Already residents of cities today in African cities, the drawing where three generations lived under one roof tends to gradually disappear. Which means that there is a need for more housing since each small entity, each generation, needs its own housing. Also the number of square meters attributed to one housing unit per person tends to increase in the last decades. We realize that with any number of difficulties, economic crises that this notion can vary relatively quickly but globally the number of square meters available of housing per person is increasing. Which means that for the same population the number of households is increased and the number of square meters per person is increased which creates an explosion in built area. This is the first densification, the development density. But this is of no interest at all to us. What interests in the case of an idea of a a sustainable city which would be a compact city, a dense city, is the population density which is expressed by number of people, by thousands of people by hectare or square kilometer. Some examples. We see that density is expressed by resident per hectare with Dhaka to Bangladesh 555 people per hectare and then 64 per hectare in Paris. So we see that between Los Angeles, extremely sparse, Casablanca which has a very heavy density and Dhaka or Hon Kong which have hyper densities, this is a way of urbanizing, a way of implementing which is extremely different depending on the cities we come across. Here is an example of low density. We see that in fact to go from this plot of land to these plots, we have a whole route so if we go back to the infrastructure, the linear meter, the distance from the road compared to the number of inhabitants, we see that it is very expensive to have low density. On the other hand, high density like this has a number of advantages. We are going to take a look at them, it's the compact city but also has, but also has a number of disadvantages. It's a great cost also, a concentration of pollution, we have already discussed this. And then we see in a drawing like this that the public space is clearly absent and the quality of life therefore suffers. So we see that between a low density and a high density, there are advantages and drawbacks. We will talk about the compact city, there is a current popular belief which leans more in the direction of density. It's important to know and I will draw the small diagram for you in the corner, it's that we have both a hyper density which costs in energy and a very low density which is equally very expensive in energy. So between the two we have here an optimum which remains to be defined. And the optimum of the first city is without doubt not the optimum of city number two, and this optimum depends clearly on the morphology of the city, the meteorological context, climate context particularly where we will not have the same optimum in the Sahelien cities as we do in the tropical cities. So the advantages of the compact city is an accessibility, facilitated of course. These are relatively low infrastructure costs. It is the possibility of preserving the natural resources since we are going to arrange it in a dense way and then free other lands. This facilitates social integration and to finish a facilitation in the financial transactions since the people are in co-presence, it's very easy to negotiate, to buy to make a number of transactions from hand to hand. The last point is the but. But of course there is always an but and this compact city we have already said it with high densities, there are a number of water waste management problems, of pollution management. Let's keep in mind that we have to have an arbitration between the nebulous city and the compact city. And we have to take into account all the evaluation criteria. In regards to the accessibility issues, it's of course the compact city. In regards to climate change issues, it's not necessarily the compact city which best resists to the climate change effects. Another congruent element with density, with the urban form, is the issue of mixing and that of diversity. Mixing, it can be social, it can be functional. Urban history indicates to us that social mixing often comes from a sociologist fantasy since there are only very few moments in the global urban history where populations have not been clearly separate and where there has been total mixing. So the mixing is more or less great. The extreme cases being apartheid but w realize that the implementations of the richest with those of the poorest don't take place in the cities and this social mixing which is an empty promise is extremely difficult to put in place and the examples of urban history are there more so to show us that it is not possible to put in place. On the other hand, functional mixing, this is very easy to put in place. What is it? It's that we don't have a neighborhood that's only residential, a neighborhood that's only business, but that we have a big neighborhood that is both business and residential. And that is what we advocate. The African cities are by definition, mixed cities, they have a functional mixing, this is what we need to try and maintain and keep at all costs. When we have created the urban form, when we have chosen low density or high density, when we have begun to draw, future needs must be anticipated. We are not going to draw the final form today. We must imagine that what we are drawing today is only a step and that we will know the final form in 10, 20, 50 or 100 years or never but that what we do today is but a first step and as a result, we must absolutely anticipate what we will need tomorrow so that the urban form may be able to continue allowing the implementation of needs in services or infrastructures. But it's of no use to just provide a parcel for future installation. The plot must still be secured. In how many cities have we seen subdivisions which have been built on plots that were for the construction of a hospital or a school. So we must be able to then secure the parcels that have been identified for future needs. And finally when we discuss urban forms, we are referring to drawings of urban forms and we are discussing the need for drawing public space. Public space has become the poor parent of the city and it's exactly through public space that the city must recreate and redraw itself. So let's turn our attention to the drawing itself, to the form of public space, to the spatiality that we are going to give it. If we look at the big cities, the big urban models, the cities which win throughout the world, the cities which are taken as examples, you can see from London to New York, from Singapore to Zurich, you can all that all these cities have made an effort. The case of Barcelona is very interesting for this. All of these cities have made an effort for public space. And it's through this public space, an space open to all, that we will be able to recreate the city of tomorrow. So there it is for the issues regarding pattern. We are between the planning and the design. The English divide urban planning and urban design. We have a tendency in the francophone world to not separate them and to use the same ways to react. I think that it's necessary to see if we are discussing at a territorial and strategic level or if we are discussing a large scale project, about city design
