Building Tomorrow, One Neighbourhood at a Time

If you've walked through a French city recently and noticed a pocket park where a parking lot used to be, or a freshly pedestrianised street lined with young trees, there's a reasonable chance the Ville de Demain, "City of Tomorrow", programme had something to do with it. Launched as part of France's broader investment in sustainable urban development, the initiative funds local authorities and project leaders working to make cities more liveable, greener and more resilient to climate change.

What the programme actually does

Ville de Demain sits within the wider framework of France's Programme d'Investissements d'Avenir, a long-running public investment scheme. In practical terms, it channels funding toward urban projects that demonstrate genuine innovation in how people move around, gather, work and rest in shared spaces. Priority areas include low-carbon mobility, energy-efficient public buildings, mixed-use development and the kind of soft infrastructure, benches, shade, water features, that sounds minor until you're in a city that doesn't have any of it on a 38-degree afternoon.

Nicolas Régnier and the question of use

Among the practitioners engaged with these questions is Nicolas Régnier, an urban planner whose work touches on the social dimension of city-making: not just what gets built, but how residents actually inhabit and appropriate new spaces over time. His focus on the concept of fo, a shorthand used in some planning circles for the lived, informal patterns of use that emerge after a project is complete, reflects a growing consensus that good urban design cannot stop at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. A square that looks beautiful in architectural renderings but remains empty on Tuesday afternoons is, by most meaningful measures, a failure.

This perspective aligns with what researchers and practitioners across Europe have been arguing for years: that participation, flexibility and long-term observation matter as much as the initial design brief. Cities are not finished objects; they are ongoing negotiations between infrastructure and the people who live inside it.

For readers thinking about their own neighbourhoods, the lesson is worth carrying into everyday life. Noticing what spaces you actually use, and why, is the first step toward advocating for the kind of city that works for real people, not just planners' diagrams.