Sustainable development and High Environmental Quality property

Action on all fronts

Grand Lyon’s Agenda 21 strategy sets out 100 actions in fields as diverse as social cohesion, economic development, greenhouse-gas reduction, improving living environments, and encouraging others to get involved in sustainable development.

In 2007, Grand Lyon adopted a Climate Plan as an integral part of its Agenda 21 strategy. The Plan’s aim is bring together and harmonise all actions undertaken by Grand Lyon’s various departments and partners with the single aim of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Creating concentrated tertiary-sector sites around strong public transport links and associating them with new development areas.

Lyon encourages functional diversity and concentrates its resources on renewable forms of local transport in order to considerably reduce levels of pollution and noise.

Moving towards High Environmental Quality property

Reference criteria for ensuring high environmental quality in the construction of new homes have been produced by the Local Energy Agency (ALE) for the Lyon conurbation with the support of ADEME, the French Agency for the Environment and Energy Management.

Objective: to pre-empt the introduction of the RT 2010 standard by ensuring that housing and mixed development zones built by the Greater Lyon Urban Community (via private developers) are environmentally friendly.

The reference criteria have been applied to around 3,225 homes currently at the design or construction stage; of these, 2,380 are being built in mixed development zones ("ZACs").

As of 1 January 2007, a set of reference criteria for office premises are applicable to all new publicly controlled construction projects in the tertiary sector.

These criteria have been drawn up and updated by the Local Energy Agency and form part of the specifications for calls for tender.

Efforts that are already reaping rewards

Lyon was a double prize winner at the 2007 LivCom Awards for liveable communities, held in London (international awards ceremony for sustainable towns and cities). Lyon won 1st prize for "enhancement of the landscape" (category: towns and cities of all sizes) for the Berges du Rhône project, and 2nd prize for "overall quality of living environment" (category: cities with 200,000 to 700,000 inhabitants), just behind Malmö in Sweden.

The berges du Rhône © Jacques Léone