This issue of Territoire en Mouvement follows on from number 53-54 about urban heritage, its values and processes, and stakeholder involvement. Issuing from the same call for papers about the place of heritage in towns today, the four articles gathered here show that heritage has become an integral part of urban planning or urban projects, despite never being front and centre. As in the previous issue, the scales and examples are varied: an urban project, a town, an industrial area, and social housing estates.

Juliette Pinard’s article focuses on two stakeholders, SNCF immobilier (in charge of the SNCF’s property holdings) and Espaces Ferroviaires (an SNCF subsidiary in charge of property development), and temporary initiatives at their sites in Paris. It shows how actions upstream of an urban project may feed into the heritagisation of architectural elements. Taking heritagisation as its guiding thread, the article explores how transitory urban development projects may create symbolic values, looking at why the holding company sought to implement such schemes through to the morphological design of the project. First, the ceremony to close the site rekindled the staff’s attachment to it. Then transitory actions (art events, public communications, and studies commissioned by the developer) and the need to tell a story about the site revealed its symbolic and heritage values, which were then taken up within the selected development project. Heritage is thus a quality which may emanate from a place to be developed. Although “transitory urbanism does not necessarily entail retaining the material traces of the footprints within urban projects, it accompanies a necessary transition in ways of thinking about and producing the town by exploiting a site’s material and symbolic resources” (Pinard, 2023).

Ryma Habdi’s article examines three 1930s social housing estates in Grenoble, focusing on how memories of place may tie in with urban projects. Drawing on work by Patrick Geddes, it follows a precise methodology to gather memories, then shows which intrinsic properties of each place are to be developed in urban renewal projects. The methodology, resembling picture stories in that it is based on itineraries and reports, identifies the constitutive elements of the site’s identity: ordinary memories of daily uses, inhabitants’ attachment to the place, and the atmosphere of its landscapes. This data is then completed by knowledge of how estates across the city evolved over time. In this way, the article identifies future trajectories for the memory of each estate. In the blocks of flats in the Abbaye estate, the internal courtyards continue to provide suitable spaces for children to play outside, thus constituting a strong quality to be taken up in the urban renewal project. In the Jean-Macé estate, weakened by the destruction of buildings and a string of projects being launched time and again, memory no longer functions as an inspirational resource to be exploited. In the La Capuche estate, the idea of the centre of each block as a shell, revealed by analysis of the memory data, may be incorporated into the future project.

Mathieu Gigot, Sébastien Jacquot, Julie Marchand, and Vincent Veschambre publish their findings about the place of heritage in the Plan Local d’Urbanisme (PLU). These obligatory documents underpinning French urban planning were introduced about twenty years ago. They include a presentation of the territory, the development project, and attendant regulations, and guide decision-making for building permits. They have brought about “a change in how heritage is conceived of as well as in how it is regulated”. Once heritage has been characterised precisely, it may feed into major development issues (relating to attractiveness, the lived environment, quality of life, and urban identity). The regulations are also very varied in scope, ranging from simply identifying elements to protecting them, and often establish a hierarchy between different types of heritage. Overall, the incorporation of heritage into PLUs has boosted the growing role local authorities play in legitimising heritage, in a process involving the competing views of local politicians, experts, and inhabitants.

Léopold Barbier’s article focuses on the area between the River Meurthe and the Marne-Rhine Canal. It examines all the properties there owned by Nancy municipality to have been granted heritage protection, bringing out how certain elements have acted as an impediment to recognising the industrial heritage. This distinct heritage associated with economic decline and job losses has also been hampered by other local obstacles: as it is densely concentrated in a marginal district, it was decided for reasons of environmental policy and social demand not to introduce street lighting when the area was reintegrated into the town. There are however ways of taking industrial heritage into account in renewing the city as a whole: the PLU zones include areas of industrial housing, and large industrial buildings still in operation or going over to other usages are being eyed by Lille’s town planners.