Eve Etienne (p), Jean-Philippe Praene, Divya Leducq, Jean-Claude Gatina

Julie Le Gallo

In France, land-use planning is governed by a set of planning documents. The latter are articulated among themselves at different spatial and hierarchical scales. At the municipality scale, the urban planning document used as reference is the Local Urban Plan (PLU). This one defines the own long-term orientations and rules of the planning of the place. Reunion Island is a French region, and since the last years, municipalities are replacing their earlier urban planning document, the Land Use Plan (POS), by a PLU. One of the documents composing the PLU is the Sustainable Planning and Development Project (PADD). It indicates the general politic orientations to contribute to the sustainable development of the locality, the general orientations for housing and amenities development and the concrete objectives concerning land-use and urban sprawl. However, the PADD seems to show similarities for one to another, while this document must be specific to its locality.
This paper aims to analyze the PADD of Reunion island municipalities with the text mining approach. The latest versions of the gathered PADD constitute the corpus. Frequencies and correlation analyzes, document clustering and topic modeling methods have been used to understand the main topics of these documents better. Then, filtering methods have been applied to the corpus in order to extract strategies of these territories for their sustainable planning. After that, most common terms have been associated with most adapted main topics (chosen keywords) in order to traduce the information to a simplified model, based on the contribution of these keywords. Finally, these outcomes have been compared with results of the same methods applied on draft-copies of existing “Eco-PLU” in order to determine the differences between them.
First results show some significant similarities between the different PADD, due to the same structuring of the documents, but also to their conformity and/or compatibility obligations to higher urban documents. It is possible to extract the main strategies of these territories: particularities of these PADD are highlighted. However, common profiles of PADD are not ever associated with similar territories.
One of the issues discussed focus on the extent to which the localities characteristics are taken into account throw the urban planning. The second concerns the real adequacy of these PADD for the sustainable urban planning of their localities, and more particularly its capacity to deal with rapid changes of the territories’ and population needs facing to its long-term orientations.

Stefanie Vanneste (p), Stijn Goeminne

Julie Le Gallo

see extended abstract