Freshway

This research program, Freshway, is funded by ADEME and was selected as a winner of the PACT2e call – Planning and Developing in the face of Climate Change, the Transition of Territories.

By studying the planning and implementation of cooling solutions in local authorities of different sizes and climates, the FreshWay project focuses on the adaptation of urban areas to the impacts of heat and heatwaves due to climate change.

It offers three major contributions:

• FreshWay builds a framework for analyzing the performance of adaptation planning based on an empirical approach (1).
• FreshWay analyzes the performance of planning to identify adaptation actions (2).
• FreshWay seeks to characterize the effectiveness of planning by assessing the gap between objectives and achievements (3).

The FreshWay project observes the use of legal urban planning and development tools from the perspective of adapting cities to climate change, particularly to combat urban overheating during heatwaves. Thus, PCAET, SCOT, PLU(i) (including PADD), and OAP are examined with the aim of providing critical feedback on existing legal tools and their uses, as well as a guide for improving the trajectories of cities for adaptation.

To study the ability of cities to withstand heat waves, one of the criteria is to examine the proportion of mineral surfaces in a city. The more mineral the city is, the hotter it gets in summer, all other things being equal.

The following graph shows the evolution of mineral surfaces between 2008 and 2021-2023 for two municipalities: Castelnau le Lez (34) and Montreuil (93). These two municipalities are very different and have evolved in very different ways. Montreuil is a very dense and highly mineral city. Its mineral surfaces have continued to increase, but relatively less than Castelnau, which still has land reserves.

The partner local authorities are:

• Paris, Montreuil, Pontault Combault, Sarcelles
• Castelnau
• Béziers

Project website: https://www.laburba.com/recherches/freshway/

Publication:

• Ruas A., J-F. Girres, A. Guene, V. Clemence, 2023, Mapping the city's trajectories to cool the city and better resist heat waves, 31st International Cartographic Conference (ICC'23), Cape Town (SA), doi.org/10.5194/ica-proc-5-19-2023, 2023.
• Barroca B., Ruas A., 2023, Urban cooling trajectories and urban planning, in Trajectoire de transition écologique - Towards a dynamic and adaptive planning of territories. Chapter 14. Ed Quae, EAN 9782759237678