Jean-Claude Driant’s research while affiliated with École d'Architecture de la Ville et des Territoires à Marne-la-Vallée and other places

The paper suggests that despite the French model of centralized housing policy, different local housing markets have developed where social housing commitment plays a key role. French housing policy has been reoriented in recent decades and is now facing a challenge: implementing the right to housing (recently strengthened through the DALO Act, 2007) and, at the same time, achieving “social cohesion” and “social mix”, which concretely means developing approaches to tackle spatial concentrations of poor and migrant households. The Paris metropolitan area offers an interesting example of how different actors deal with the huge territorial inequalities that result from former housing policies and the recent and ongoing unemployment crisis. Housing construction has improved as well as institutional cooperation, but conflicts of interest and real estate speculation are still able to slow down solidarity at regional level.

The place of the popular habitat within the sustainable city is the central question discussed in this interview of Jean-Claude Driant, a specialist in the housing questions in France, who worked on the case of Lima 30 years ago. This discussion, begun on the occasion of the national urban fórum entitled “Ciudades populares, ciudades sostenibles? El habitat popular en debate” in September, 2016 in Lima, suggests an approach to different aspects of popular neighborhoods, and its associated public policies. It assumes that the confrontation of different realities will yield original ideas, or at least, renew the ways of addressing and formulating the problem. “Social mixity”, participation andsustainability are some of the issues tackled, from the French standpoint, while putting the Peruvian reality in perspective.