Urban heritage and new planning tools in Paris region

In recent years there is a growing interest to integrate heritage protection into urban planning legislation and practice. This paper analyses new planning tools for the preservation of urban heritage, focusing on the architectural heritage between the two world wars. The study area is Paris-Est-Marne&Bois, a union of municipalities which is a part of the Parisian metropolis. In this territory, political and institutional actors are facing the need to coordinate their plans and heritage-related measures into an overall urban planning and development framework. Nowadays, only few of the thirteen municipalities expressed their interest in the protection of the twentieth century architecture; therefore, the work in this paper was primarily motivated by the need to raise awareness about recent building heritage. The object of the research includes social housing, private housing and public buildings, typical of interwar new expansion areas in Parisian suburbs. This work has two purposes: proposing to overcome some contradictions concerning the local instruments of urban heritage protection and offering suggestions for more relevant heritage tools.