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The proverbial administrative complexity of Paris and its region, which also includes a metropolitan authority since 2016, has not prevented multiple and rapid changes to take place in the last decade. A national government decision has initiated the construction of a new regional metropolitan public transportation infrastructure that has leveraged more than €15 billions of green bonds. Mounting environmental challenges are triggering new societal priorities and legal changes, heightened by the COVID-19 crisis context. Since 2014, projects and plans led by local governments to value nature-based solutions (NBS) have met a rising interest from national and international investors and developers, in a context of multiple climate and biodiversity initiatives from the private sector and the civil society. However, assessing their long-term value remains a challenge for both governments and researchers while the calls for nature to remain a common good stir new forms of vigorous social engagement. The Paris case shows that the art of creating NBS that maximize biodiversity and support CO₂ reduction at large metropolitan scale depends on two priorities. The first is strengthening global commitments. The second is refocusing existing massive investments in grey infrastructure systems, so far major drivers of public investments, as infrastructure for distribution, unlocking local biodiversity valuation potential, and supporting social innovation.

David Fée contrasts the revival of the New Towns principles under various forms in the UK over the last 20 years with the absence of debate in France. He first reviews the history of the creation of the New Towns and their iconic status in the new French Fifth Republic born in 1958. Then, he examines the housing situation today which on the face of it would warrant the development of new settlements to meet the housing needs of the country. This paradox is then accounted for by referring to a different demographic context to the 1960s and 1970s and to the transfer of planning powers from the 1980s on from central to local government. These are deemed to be incompatible with a new top-down planning experiment on the size of New Towns. He then moves on to the issue of contemporary official planning principles that emphasise sustainability and densification that are thought to run against the possibility of building on green fields. This is compounded by the decision of many councils to accommodate new housing in the shape of ecoquartiers (eco-neighbourhoods) or environmentally sensitive urban extensions built by private and public developers in keeping with the local development plan. Finally, the question of public opinion and New Towns is raised and he argues that their association in the public’s mind with post-war high-rise urban extensions makes it difficult to repeat the experiment.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between banks’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) mechanisms at the governance level and their likelihood of pursuing green product strategies. It also examines how CSR characteristics and green product strategies have evolved across regions and time.

Using a sample of listed banks from different economic areas over the period 2010–2019, the authors examine how CSR mechanisms at the governance level and green product strategies, which they categorize through principal component analysis, have changed over time and across regions. The authors then conducted panel regression to identify which CSR characteristics affect the likelihood that banks implement green product strategies.

Results show that CSR mechanisms related to bank transparency and commitment to the community, such as sustainability reporting and United Nations Global Compact adherence, are substantive in affecting the likelihood of banks pursuing green product strategies. In contrast, mechanisms related to internal organization, such as the presence of a CSR Committee and an environmental management team, tend to play more a symbolic role. Findings also support a reconsideration of environmental, social and governance-related compensation schemes, which appear to decrease the likelihood that banks engage in some forms of green financing. The likelihood of banks pursuing green product strategies varies across regions and has increased after the Paris Agreement.

The findings are useful in guiding regulators, supervisory authorities and policymakers in defining policies that can create conditions for banks to develop green products and, hence, encourage the sustainability behaviors of their clients. Empirical evidence reveals that some corporate governance mechanisms and green product strategies correlate positively, institutional factors matter and public policies can play a role in strengthening such a correlation. However, results are limited to specific geographical areas and listed banks.

This study contributes to the institutional literature by showing that some corporate governance mechanisms are substantive in increasing the likelihood of banks pursuing green product strategies, while others are more symbolic. It also extends the literature by analyzing how banks belonging to different geographical areas have responded, over time, to sustainability objectives.

The impetus was to assess pluses and minuses of a national mandate with specific paratransit guidelines per “the” 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) model. Two European countries were chosen to explore other ways to serve persons with disabilities, not driven by ADA.

This research compared mandates in each area (via a tri-lingual survey) both as related to ADA’s most common practices and the European model of “Persons with Reduced Mobility” (PMRs). After data collection, analysis compared and contrasted ADA and PMR schemes.

Even in California, differences were found among survey sites; for instance, the organization type and mix of services varied greatly, despite a national framework. In Europe, there were more similar approaches among regions where, without a national framework, there was flexible, regional decision-making. In Europe, the national focus is on more regular transit accessibility, maximizing transit use rather than special services.

Five recommendations resulted and apply most directly to California and equally for agencies with or without ADA. The strengths of the PMR approach are transferable to California and the trend among a few California partners to go beyond ADA, while only a local option, reinforces the strength of the PMR solution.

How to improve service and financial performance and enlarge the private sector role are put forward. Existing methods, whether Federal or California-driven, need revisiting to achieve true benefits of coordination.

Two metropolitan cities of similar size and less than 400 Kilometres apart, yet London and Paris display vastly contrasting patterns of retailing. Retailing, unlike manufacturing industry, has yet to go truly multi‐national in its organisation; but the trends in this direction are clear. Retail organisations in England and France, however, will have to contend with very different patterns of retailing in the two metropolitan cities should they decide to set up in them. The reasons for these differences are partly historical and partly administrative. Since 1945 the outward growth of London has been limited by an extremely powerful system of land‐use planning. This has had the effect of stopping London at the point that its outward growth had reached prior to the outbreak of World War II. By 1938, aided by the development of suburban electric railways in the two decades since 1918, the suburbs of London had sprawled out 19 to 24 Km from the centre. In that year, an Act of Parliament created the Green Belt, which provided a means of restraining further development. The area within the Green Belt is now the province of the Greater London Council, the strategic planning authority for London set up in 1964. Beyond the Green Belt, in the Outer Metropolitan Area, some 40 to 50 Km from Central London, a series of new towns has been built. While Greater London has lost population and jobs since the war, this area beyond the Green Belt has witnessed a major growth of population and jobs in the same period. (Milton Keynes, for instance, is planned to accommodate 500,000 people and by 1977 a covered shopping centre of 84,000 m2 will be open, rising to 172,000 m2 of shopping space by 1991 with 28,000 car parking spaces).

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the mechanisms involved in the progressive integration of marginal and peripheral urban areas, located close to established tourist destinations, into the visited tourism perimeter, and the interplay of the supporting public and private actors. It focusses on the intertwining processes of commercial gentrification, heritagization and aestheticization of former “ordinary” or marginal areas as tools for and indications of their tourism development. It explores how the metropolitan tourism geography is progressively redesigned.

Following a comprehensive literature analysis, the Saint-Ouen flea market was selected as the object of study. The methodology is based on extensive in situ observations, a systematic analysis of the press and a corpus of tourist guides and several in-depth interviews with local public and private stakeholders.

This paper shows that combined public (Parisian urban and tourism stakeholders) and private interests led to the integration in the tourism perimeter of a space that was once on the margins of the tourism and metropolitan area. It highlights the mechanisms of this integration and the link between touristification, gentrification, aestheticization and artification. It was found that private investors and political decision makers regard Saint-Ouen flea market as a major opportunity for tourism and real estate development, which leads to some contradictions regarding heritage protection. Finally, it shows that market traders opposed the evolution of a commercial place into a place of symbolic consumption. At another level, it shows the stakes of tourism diversification in a metropolitan tourism destination that is characterized by overtourism.

More studies are needed to identify not only the potential of flea markets to diversify tourist areas and practices, but also any potential resistance. The consequences on metropolitan tourism can be the subject of additional investigations: can this tourism diversification reduce overtourism in the centre, or is it only a diversification that functions as an additional driver of attractiveness? This research opens new perspectives on the modes of diversification (spatial and experiential) of metropolitan tourism as well as on the role that commercial changes play in these evolutions. It also makes it possible to question the modes of engagement of investors and traders in tourism.

This is an in-depth analysis of the case of Saint-Ouen flea market. The issues raised herein are applicable to similar peripheral urban areas, flea markets especially, that are rarely studied on the tourism-aestheticization-gentrification nexus. The analysis also shows the diversification of places and imaginaries of metropolitan tourism.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the potentialities offered by a historical approach by addressing its scientific and societal issues as well as its opportunities at the scale of different continents and cultural areas. The authors then show the major role played by traditional societies and indigenous peoples in preserving and transmitting a culture of risk which today is threatened by an unprecedented memory break resulting from the process of globalization. Finally, the authors present two concrete examples of projects aiming to use historical lessons learned to reduce the vulnerability of local communities.

Historical documentation provides a series of very varied archives, voluminous and geographically scattered. Several types of series will be studied. Besides the written archives, the authors shall also realize an inventory of all the elements of the cultural heritage and the memory evoking the risks and the vulnerabilities.

This study shows how forgetting past disasters has contributed to increasing the vulnerability of the modern societies and building a “society of risk.” Paradoxically, industrialization and the era of the engineer opposed “pre-modern” societies to so-called “modern” societies. In this way, ancestral knowledge and strategies have often been despised in favor of hard defense works whose limits are now being measured after the recent disasters. On the other hand, the paper promotes a different model combining both engineering and local historical/cultural knowledge in order to design a more sustainable and applicable strategy.

The authors show the major role played by traditional societies and indigenous peoples in preserving and transmitting a culture of risk which today is threatened by an unprecedented memory break resulting from the process of globalization.

This chapter examines the similarities and differences in ways of life and experiences of residents in Milton Keynes and Cergy-Pontoise. Both New Towns resulted from efforts to create a form of urbanity that combines the attractions of urban and suburban life. In the tension between urbanity and suburbanity, many planners emphasised urbanity. To many new residents, their New Town was attractive precisely because of its suburban character. Using empirical material drawn from interviews with middle-class residents, this chapter looks at socio-spatial practices and experiences in the private domain of the home, in neighbourhoods and in public spaces and in the wider urban region. It is suggested that ways of living are conditioned by the structure and design of a city’s spaces, but people do not automatically conform to them. Their practices deviate from the city as planned and designed because residents will add meanings of their own to it. The chapter also reveals that there are differences in ‘suburban urbanity’ between both New Towns. The planning concepts and the daily lives of residents reflect cultural values attributed to suburbanity and urbanity in England and France. If the suburban middle class’s practices in the two cities reveal similar patterns, there are differences as well. In Milton Keynes, the emphasis is more on the private domain, and this causes residents to utilise and experience this city in a strikingly natural fashion. In Cergy-Pontoise, residents have a strong involvement with both the public domain and their own home.

The purpose of this paper is to present a benchmarking study of operation and maintenance costs of French healthcare facilities between 2008 and 2009. The investigation presents findings using quantitative methods, including cumulative frequency and descriptive statistics. The purpose also is to highlight and capture the performance profile of long‐term hospitals, using several operational cost drivers.

A literature review revealed that there are no studies on the benchmarking of operation or maintenance costs of health facilities in France. Operational cost drivers reported in literature from other countries were used as the underlying constructs for this research, with a view to generating a benchmarking framework for the health assets in the data sample. The data were extracted from the databases of the hospitals concerned. Some of the data were collected via interviews and questionnaires. Statistical analysis was carried out to investigate and generate potential benchmarking cost curves. Potential operational cost drivers were extracted and used to develop cumulative frequency curves for benchmarking purposes.

The authors found that cost per bed ratio can be used as an efficient metric to classify health facilities into similar to data sets. The results also show that the operational costs of utilities, maintenance and operations & maintenance staff correlate positively and significantly with the square meter of floor area. This relationship indicates that 82 per cent of the operational performance can be explained by this linear relationship. However, it was found that the relationship between the total of operational costs per square meter with the floor is negatively correlated and surprisingly only explains 41 per cent of the performance of the health asset operational cost variation in the data sample.

The paper presents the first metric benchmarking method in France which allows health facility managers in France to evaluate and develop operational strategies, with a view to reducing the costs burden.