Bordeaux is famous for its small ground floor houses. But to accommodate the flow of new inhabitants, the city is gaining height.
When a lower town takes off: in Bordeaux, famous for its small ground floor houses, the new neighborhoods grow vertically to accommodate the incessant flow of new inhabitants into the metropolis, like the immense Euratlantique project. AFP produced a photographic report in these new neighborhoods ahead of the inauguration, at the beginning of July, of the Simone-Veil bridge, which will be the eighth to span the Garonne in the Gironde conurbation. Symbolically, it will unite the three cities of this urban development project, the largest outside the Paris region: Bordeaux, Bègles and Floirac.
Bassins à flots, Ginko, Bastide-Niel, Brazza: other new districts have emerged from the ground to support the objective of a metropolis with one million inhabitants carried out in the 2000s by the former mayor of Bordeaux Alain Juppé and the former socialist president of the intercommunality Vincent Feltesse. But Euratlantique, an operation declared of national interest in 2009 to support the arrival of the Paris-Bordeaux high-speed rail line, inaugurated in 2017, is of another magnitude.
The towers are blooming
Extended from the end of 2023 until 2040, the project aims to accommodate 50,000 inhabitants and 30,000 jobs on 738 hectares of railway and industrial wasteland. Demographic pressure is strong in the metropolis, which brings together Bordeaux and 27 other municipalities: the population gains 10,000 inhabitants per year and has crossed the 800,000 mark.
Towers are flourishing, with innovations, such as the wooden frame symbolized by Hyperion, the tallest building of this type in France, or the future Tebio, the first reversible building in France which can be used for housing or offices. This new landscape contrasts with the neighborhoods of small low houses, or “stalls”, which frame the historic heart of the city, itself limited to three or four floors.
“Bordeaux is a lower town, a town of shops, for historical, geographical and geological reasons (marshy soils), with, before the 1950s, emergences made up of bell towers,” explains mayor Pierre Hurmic.
“If we want more residents, to densify more, we can usefully go through raising buildings, I am very in favor of it, but we will not do it just anywhere,” he adds. Some residents of the first Euratlantique buildings, such as the Amédée Sacré-Coeur residents’ collective, nevertheless denounce “excessive concreteization”.
The displayed watchword is mixed
In the new neighborhoods, the slogan displayed is diversity, with a social housing quota of 35%, which will even be increased to 40% in future projects in Bordeaux to catch up with the city (19% instead of 25% required by the Solidarity and Urban Renewal/SRU law), but also regulated sales prices for vacant housing, lower than the metropolitan average.
Businesses of a new type, such as a hotel-youth hostel with its “rooftop” or a hall mixing trendy bars and restaurants, target a new population coming to settle in the areas close to the station, made attractive by the LGV and the rise of teleworking. The new offices still bear the mark of Euratlantique’s initial ambition, which was to create a business district, such as the imposing headquarters of the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations.
Today, this objective is officially buried. The new roadmap adopted last year talks about revegetation, de-waterproofing and even consultation with residents, to build “a city on the trajectory of carbon neutrality”, according to the general director of Euratlantique, Valérie Lasek.