Peri-urban farms with short food supply chains are currently enjoying strong growth and represent the leading type of urban agriculture for the supply of fresh produce in towns and cities. This type of farm includes horticultural areas and many new small-scale projects based on alternative systems such as bio-intensive market gardening and permaculture (CC by 2.0 - Sustainable sanitation).Urban community gardens and urban mini-farms are two other forms of urban agriculture that are currently being developed. Community gardens combine social, educational and food-related goals and are projects that attract a participation from the greatest number of urban dwellers (Les Vignoles gymnasium, Fanny Provent).Urban micro-farms can be multi-purpose or focus primarily on production (Hotel Pullman Eiffel Tower, Paris).Less common in French towns, greenhouses, indoor agriculture and low-tech and high-tech systems entail greater investment costs (Agripolis farm, Paola Mugnier).These production systems are not very attractive for urban dwellers and, as regards greenhouses, raise issues related to the landscape (an integrated greenhouse on one of the buildings of the former Anderlecht abattoirs, Paola Mugnier).

Paola Mugnier and Fanny Provent also describe multifaceted and multi-purpose production systems. Their practical guide « Urban agriculture: how to implement it on rooftops and terraces? » (from which photos #2 to #5 are taken), as well as the Exp’au urban agriculture consulting company and agriculturalization indicators, feature among the approaches rolled out, based on researcher knowledge, to assist and equip developers when selecting project content, in addition to project implementation and management. Another important aspect for developers is the issue of urban contaminations. The REFUGE methodology has been designed to conduct an assessment of health risks based on a historical survey of the site and ground investigations. This type of assessment reveals a lack of risk or identifies when a site is in a grey area, as is often the case, which may be used by rolling out a health control plan or through farming methods that do not use the ground soil.

The prospects for the development of urban agriculture are set to be extensive and varied. Many flat roofs represent untapped high-potential land resources. A number of new requirements are emerging in relation to the analysis of soil bearing capacity, an improved integration of greenhouses in buildings, optimised management of flows and uses and lastly the incorporation of urban agriculture in circular economy scenarios.

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Cyrille François is a postdoctoral teacher-researcher. His work focuses on the environmental issues associated with the daily mobility of individuals. He is interested in mobility, not in terms of the simple use of a technology but as a social reality anchored in a specific territory.

Liu Liu is a Civil Engineer with a PhD in Urban Planning. She drew up the “Transit Oriented Development” scenarios for the European Metropolis of Lille and participated in the development of energy transition strategies in Île-de-France.

Cyrille François and Liu Liu are currently working on Les Lumières Pleyel neighbourhood in Saint-Denis as an experimentation ground. This onsite work is part of their post-doctorate project at the École des Ponts ParisTech (Laboratoire Ville Mobilité Transport) in the framework of lab recherche environnement VINCI ParisTech.

This talk is co-organised as part of Leonard‘s “Ensemble pour demain” conferences. 

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Digital model of the project (Pleiades).Dynamic thermal simulation results (Pleiades Comfie), temperatures during heatwaves.Life-cycle assessment results (Pleiades Equer), contributions to global warming.

The research work carried out at the École des Ponts ParisTech aims to anticipate mobility practices and services in the Les Lumières Pleyel neighbourhood as well as their impact on the environment. A statistical approach based on analysis of the socio-economic profiles of the individuals who will live and work in the neighbourhood aims to achieve an initial rapid estimate of uses and activities. This approach is then fine-tuned by multi-agent modelling that is aimed at a much more precise estimation of mobility needs and the effects of the implementation of new mobility services. The environmental impacts of associated mobility practices are then assessed through the prism of life-cycle assessment. It is therefore possible to assess the relevance of development choices and to propose solutions that are tailored to local characteristics, in order to improve the environmental performance of a neighbourhood.

the MATSim multi-agent model used by the LVMT laboratory of École des Ponts ParisTech to simulate the mobility of the Île-de-France population.

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The data comes from the international Ecoinvent database: each life-cycle inventory contains several thousand flows, including substances such as dioxins. LCA is therefore an effective tool for supporting eco-design, which makes it possible to compare architectural variants, construction materials or energy sources in order to choose solutions with a lower environmental impact.

The measured indicators include, among others, energy resources, water, raw materials, health and biodiversity, and climate.

The graphic modeller enables the entry of a set of buildings and the automatic generation of the corresponding solar masks. It is then possible to perform thermal simulations and life-cycle assessments by building type or for an entire urban project. In LCA, roads and other outdoor spaces, such as parks, are taken into account as well as networks (heat, drinking water and wastewater), waste management and transport.

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Construction is the economic sector representing the largest share of final energy consumption in France, and today, 82% of the population lives in a large urban area. It is becoming essential to reduce the energy consumption of neighbourhoods and, in particular, to increase the environmental performance of buildings. This results in the need for knowledge in order to develop an approach to help eco-design neighbourhoods.

Objectives

The objective of the thesis is to assess the environmental and economic performance of neighbourhoods, and to optimise it according to parameters of building design, energy production and distribution. Based on multi-criterion optimisation, the approach will offer a combination of dynamic thermal simulation, life-cycle assessment and economic evaluation tools for projects to identify, on a multi-criterion basis (Pareto front), neighbourhoods generating high levels of low costs and environmental impacts over the entire life cycle.

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The eco-design of neighbourhoods requires various issues to be factored in: the socio-economic well-being and health of residents, the environmental impacts linked to the occupancy of buildings and the use of transport, the system effects which are at the origin of phenomena such as road congestion or development of a neighbourhood’s appeal.

The postdoctoral fellowship, led by Liu Liu at the École des Ponts ParisTech under the supervision of Fabien Leurent and Nicolas Coulombel, aims to model the daily activities and mobility of people who live or pass through a neighbourhood in order to deduce the economic, social and environmental impacts. The model considers microlocal conditions (the location of people, attractive services and infrastructures, demand for activities, available means of transport) and the interactions between an urban fragment and the rest of the agglomeration.

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The movement of people, as well as of goods, has grown enormously in recent decades. The environmental assessment of daily mobility therefore requires an integrated approach representing the transport system, but also the urban system into which it fits.

This postdoctoral project, led by Cyrille François and supervised by Nicolas Coulombel, Adelaïde Feraille and Fabien Leurent at École des Ponts ParisTech, aims to design, develop and implement an environmental assessment methodology for mobility at the scale of a neighbourhood based on the life-cycle assessment (LCA) approach.

The first stage of the work consists in quantifying and characterising the trips generated by a neighbourhood using models for forecasting transport demand. The environmental impacts associated with these trips will then be estimated using an LCA-type approach considering vehicles and infrastructure. An application to the Les Lumières Pleyel neighbourhood in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis department) is currently in progress.

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Consideration of the city-nature link concerns many levers of action: the greening of neighbourhoods and buildings (on the façade or on the roof); the permeabilisation of soils, the configuration of buildings and the properties of plant cover, which play an essential role in controlling urban heat island phenomena. These analyses must also factor in the relationship that city users enjoy with nature, whether in the context of setting up shared gardens or green and blue belts or concerning perception of biodiversity.

AgroParisTech takes a general interest in living things in urban, suburban and rural spaces. The work carried out by its teams within the framework of the lab recherche environnement has focused on controlling the ecological impacts of transport infrastructures and the implementation and monitoring of compensation measures. Projects have also concerned the implementation of indicators of the state of biodiversity in a neighbourhood and have resulted in a tool that is accessible to practitioners, dubbed Biodi(V)strict®.

Ecosystem services provided by nature in cities are another topic of research, which concerns the effects of the greening of neighbourhoods and buildings on the regulation of the internal temperature of buildings and the reduction of the urban heat island phenomenon.

Finally, another line of work concerns the development of technical systems for urban agriculture and has led to the publication of a guide for the development of vegetable gardens on roofs. A particularly interesting study concerns a technique for recovering urban waste for the manufacture of growth substrates that are suitable for rooftops.

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