Will the government backtrack on commercial zones?

• Emmanuel Macron has agreed to a proposal from the Citizens' Climate Convention aimed at establishing a moratorium on the construction of new commercial areas.
• The associations fear that Amazon warehouses will escape the new regulations and empty the moratorium of its substance.
• In Rosny 2, a collective is fighting against the extension of the second most profitable shopping center in France.

When you land in the corner without knowing, it feels like a labyrinth which you can never find the exit. Department stores glued like dominoes and shopping areas that seem to follow one another indefinitely before the highway. At the center of everything, when we finally understood the geography of the place, the gigantic Westfield Rosny 2 shopping center, landlocked between two highways (the A3 and the A86), a busy national highway and a RER railway line, is from Paris.

A beautiful beast of 169 stores spread over 120,000 m2 on the ground, for one of the biggest turnover in the sector, 600 million euros in good years. But a beautiful beast that is still hungry for small consumers to eat. Four building permits are in the pipeline to create a food court on the ground floor, extend the shopping center in length, and add an office tower over it. 58,000 m2 more on paper, almost eight adult-sized soccer fields, to get an idea.

Macron's surprise flip-flop

"We are told to produce and consume fewer objects, we are told that the purchasing power will fall, we are told that we must give priority to local shops, but we want to enlarge an already huge shopping center", plague Nicolas Perguet, spokesperson for Alternitaba Rosny. The small association took up arms against the project with a certain indifference in 2018. A petition with initially mixed success even aroused mockery from the mayor in Le Parisien . But the contempt changed sides without warning on June 29, when Emmanuel Macron sided with the Citizens' Convention on the issue of moratoriums on peripheral commercial areas.

👉Today, around 60 collective residents threatened by e-commerce warehouse projects & commercial zones have sent a letter to @EmmanuelMacron to demand a moratorium on both commercial surfaces and warehouses. e-commerce! #ForUnMoratoire pic.twitter.com/wVmTRwhnqy

"Stop the concrete, it is a project to make our country more human, basically more beautiful," ignited the President of the Republic, in a lyrical mood, he who had always opposed so far a too intrusive regulation in this area, as in the rest. An enthusiasm immediately shared by Bruno Le Maire, the Minister of the Economy: “At one point, we must say stop. The moratorium is stop. We look to see if there are no alternatives. Can we not take brownfields rather than agricultural land? Shouldn't we densify a village better than extend it? This displayed voluntarism surprised even Alma Dufour, in charge of the overproduction and consumption theme at Friends of the Earth. “We thought this government allergic to all brutal supervision. Now, I am waiting to see how it will translate into the bill. I still have doubts when I read the proposal for the Citizens' Convention, which has been watered down a lot. ”

Can Amazon go between the drops?

When we delve into the bushy report of the convention, we can indeed wonder: if the 150 are in agreement to "immediately take coercive measures in order to stop the development of peri-urban commercial areas that consume a lot of space" and that the logistic committee which accompanied them recommends to impose the rule “zero new surface on the ground”, the asterisks leave the field open to the exceptions. What about enlargements of already existing areas, such as Rosny 2? What about e-commerce warehouses, the construction of which requires no national authorization? Bercy tells our colleagues at Le Figaro that the question was not settled but that the Citizens' Convention "did not specifically mention warehouses", a way of preparing for the worst.

The President supports the @Conv_Citoyenne's proposal for a moratorium on the construction of new commercial areas on the outskirts of cities. This is an important decision to fight against # artificialisation of the soil! It should apply to #Amazon warehouses. pic.twitter.com/v1HUlJQzTf

The possible distinction is important. On the thirty large projects in the making, the associative lookouts have around ten potential Amazon locations throughout the territory. "If the moratorium does not concern them, it will be difficult to understand," warns Alma Dufour. "The president spoke a lot about" yellow vests "in his speech to citizens, but if there is one company that has personalized what is rejected by" yellow vests ", it is Amazon. Warehouses were even a preferential target during the movement. To allow the arrival of these warehouses is to allow more than a billion products to surge in France in 2021, with the consequences that this would bring in terms of employment and global warming ”.

A French department lost every ten years

The best-selling dossier by supporters of the moratorium? The world-famous landscape of the Pont du Gard, threatened by a six-storey Amazon warehouse, located less than four kilometers from the millennial aqueduct. "We must at all costs stop developing this type of business and preserve agricultural soils," says Dominique Potier. The elected PS of Meurthe-et-Moselle led a parliamentary information mission on the agricultural land condition. "The artificialisation of soils is progressing by 8.5% per year, or approximately one French department lost every ten years to the benefit of concrete". This represents a million more m² of retail space per year, when the population only increases by 3.8% on average.

The Confederation of Merchants of France mobilizes against the "Amazonization" of France. The 10 groin of projects from the e-commerce giant would destroy more than 7,500 jobs in local commerce. Support from Delphine Batho, promoter of the moratorium project https://t.co/2lUWKImUjC pic.twitter.com/0H3XCoO1PN

Quite proud of having been able to return 800 hectares to agriculture in his region, Dominique Potier proposed several avenues to his colleagues in the Assembly: taxing the added value of land so as to have a more dissuasive amount or sanctifying agricultural land by making them non-buildable, for example. Indispensable to avoid the pharaonic ambitions of certain promoters however alerted by the local actors on the fragility of the ecosystems and the absence of the taking into account of the climatic stake. In Rosny, Alternitaba saw dark red when consulting the opinion of the Regional Mission of Environmental Authority (MRAE), which noted, among other things, that the client was mistaken in indicating the layout and management plan for watercourse on which the commercial area depends. A detail that is not one, since the notice also indicates "that the site is subject to flooding by rainwater runoff".

16% more road traffic in Rosny

"And in summer, it will be an oven, because there is no vegetation or water points," deplores Chloé Gerbier, lawyer within the association Notre Affaire à Tous, who helped Alternitaba to file a dispute against the expansion project. In the impact study, the question of greenhouse gases is evacuated in one line, while it concludes with an increase of 16% in traffic during rush hour and that the concentrations of nitrogen dioxide are already well above the regulatory values ​​”. The former municipal team, beaten by a hair this time, counters that the imminent completion of the extension of line 11 of the metro will allow customers to leave the car at the garages. Not to mention the carrot of the job all cooked in the mouth. According to a study by the National Council of Shopping Centers, a shopping center promised on average 560 full-time jobs in 2017.

The fight against imposed and polluting projects continues 👩‍⚖️ @ NotreAffaire supports @AlternatibaRSB, @BONDYECOLOGIE, @LeSensdelHumus, @Mursapeches and MNLE 93 to file a free appeal against the project to extend the Rosny 2 shopping center in the Paris region ⚠️ pic .twitter.com / J0oUIwypgn

"We must stop with this story of job creation," gets angry MP Patrick Vignal, specialist in issues of revitalization of city centers and defender of the moratorium for many years. "Whenever I see a local elected representative, he answers" Patrick, you understand, they hire me all the young people in the area and they pay me the rugby club ". Except that for a job created in a commercial area, we delete two elsewhere, and three when we talk about Amazon. So maybe we have to do "at the same time" on this subject, and that there are places where the density allows the establishment of new stores, but we cannot put 5 billion in the renovation of city ​​centers on one side and encourage big shopping malls on the other ”.

Town centers, the first collateral victims

The latter have long been accused of driving the former to the cemetery, the old battle between lousy France and dead France already agitated during the presidential campaign. The figures speak for themselves: the commercial vacancy rate is skyrocketing in medium-sized cities (12% in 2018, according to the specialized trade federation), a phenomenon which is also beginning to affect some of the 835 centers giant sales representatives established in France, a sign that the model may have run out of breath without the help of anyone. "Building a shopping center is just winning a market that exists elsewhere, philosopher Nicolas Perguet. But it is not by killing the neighbor that one can survive ”.

Seine-Saint-Denis: a recovery that does good to the Rosny 2 shopping center #SeineSaintDenis https://t.co/ZkMkLLw6dM #Rediff

In Rosny, we are playing on both counts, since the City has set up since 2009 a perimeter of safeguard “with right of preemption of the commercial and artisanal funds”, in order to keep the hand on its downtown area. It works, as far as we can judge: apart from a store in the basket Bio chain in disrepair along the Parish of Saint-Geneviève, the main street is rather busy. But the madness of grandeur seems to have lived.

An open letter to the President of the Republic

Before being beaten by his former rebellious assistant for a handful of voices, Claude Capillon, the former mayor, had abruptly renounced the iconic project of Vertical Village, which was to crown Rosny with a new futuristic housing tower of 50 meters from high. "The health crisis forces us to rethink our way of considering town planning", he justified to his constituents. Jean-Paul Fauconnet, his successor, did not promise anything to detractors of Rosny 2.

However, it “committed to adopt a voluntary approach” to end the development of large commercial areas on its territory. For its part, Alternitaba continues to rush into the breach. The association joined 60 other citizens' collectives to demand, in an open letter to Emmanuel Macron, "the stopping of the works and the suspension of the authorizations pending the obtaining of the moratorium". History of not letting go of the momentum.

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