client:DRIEA Ile-de-france, France.
team: Acadie - Güller Güller architecture urbanism - Atelier Christian de Portzamparc

The vast airport region of Grand Roissy, around Paris’ Charles-de-Gaulle airport, has been the most dynamic economic territory of the metropolitan area of Paris in the last decade and a driving force for growth and jobs. But at the same time this has generated its own urban challenges: constraints to urban development related to airport noise, low level of housing production, lack of coordinated planning, and major difficulties in accessing the areas which concentrate employment for the local inhabitants.

In bringing together key stakeholders in development and planning (Conseil régional, Conseils départmentaux 93, 95, 77, local elected officials, ADP, planners, representatives of the aviation industry), this study for the sustainable development of the airport region, sought to fulfill the following ambitions:

- Reorient the perception of the Grand Roissy airport region, both in terms of its potential relationship to the city of Paris and as well as its broader role in defining the spatial dynamics of the north-eastern Ile-de-France region

- Establish a strategy of common objectives for a more efficient and qualitative organization as well as controlled development within this strategic territory

- Guarantee the spatial coherence of commercial real-estate development

- Improve the balance between residential and commercial development through an increase in housing supply

- Ensure better land-use practices alongside an increased emphasize in the preservation of agricultural and natural areas

This process provided stakeholders with a framework of shared objectives and a methodology for cooperation, in addition to allowing for the review of institutional relationships, across the scale of the Grand Roissy airport region.