The promotion of the nature is one of the tools used to improve the urban environment, reduce pollution, mitigate climate changes and contribute to the maintenance of biodiversity. But works in urban ecology have focused essentially on parks, gardens and vegetated roofs. Only few researches involve the greening of walls and streets that could play a social, ecological and physical role, base of an urban sustainability. This research is essential for a global approach to the urban planning and set up of green networks in dense city. We propose a consortium of research laboratories, SMEs and associations involved in urban approach, able to make a first assessment of the ecological services provided by these greenings, to study their ecological and biochemical functions, technical implementations and citizen appreciations, but also to experiment with innovative prototypes. Our program can be divided into two main areas: - What is and how does it work today? This work will involve national and international literature review (Phase A on the state of the art and synthesis of knowledge on ecological vegetation walls , courtyards and streets in town: expected technical services, implementations, observed social involvement...) but also active research on the ecological functions (Phase B on the evaluation of biotic and abiotic functions of current vegetation techniques: what biodiversity, what relationship with substrates, conditions and physicochemical constraints...) and social (Phase C on assessment of societal functioning of the vegetation: what economy, what governance, what regulations, what perception and opinions... ) - What innovative proposals can be made? This involves experimental work at building and street scale (Phase D testing of innovative proposals for vegetation: reasoning on the development of prototypes, architectural experiments on coatings, substrates, methods of irrigation...), but also studies on the potential and functioning at a global scale (Phase E on the evaluation of urban potential and functionning expected in an urban project: area available, types of spaces and owners, relationship with greenways, possible regulations...). The work is set to three years and analyses will be conducted at different scales island / district / city on the city of Nantes and the Grand Paris.

JASSUR project is intending to study functions, uses, modalities of functioning and potential risks or dangers resulting from associative gardens, in emerging sustainable cities. Those urban associative gardens, which can be referred to as several names, and exist under various status and forms, are growing up in many industrialized countries, including France. This project aims at identifying required actions to maintain, restore, transform or even develop the effect of associative gardens on urban territories facing the challenges of sustainability. In order to do this, the project leans on a consortium of 12 research partners (various institutions) and citizen organizations in seven French cities (Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Nancy, Nantes, Paris and Toulouse). JASSUR project is based on a central question: what services do urban associative gardens provide for cities sustainable development? Ecosystem services rendered to the city, understood as in the complete meaning of the term proposed by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (provisioning, regulating, supporting, cultural services) are still largely unknown. Facing the knowledge to develop in order to go through these services, JASSUR project assumes that studying food services provided by these urban associative gardens, which are very poorly studied, is a link between: • A bio-physico-chemical characterization of soils and products of the gardens: potential risks of pollution due to urban context (soil, atmosphere) are central as they may counteract the food supply service; • A socio-technical characterization of gardeners practices, both regarding their choices in terms of crops, their production techniques and the quantitative and qualitative contribution of garden products to insure a food supply and a better diet to families; • A socio-political characterization of the governance of these spaces in urban areas, particularly in terms of managing their locations, ways of functioning, potential environmental and health risks. The scientific program is organized in tasks, the first one being coordination (task 1) and four knowledge production tasks. Task 2 deals with the actors involved in the establishment and life of the gardens, their governance and their place in urban planning. Task 3 analyzes food supply service (cropping practices, yields and uses of products, measures of consumption and nutrient intake, gardener’s representations as to the advantages and dangers of gardens). Task 4 deals with regulatory and support ecosystem services, emphasizing those related to biodiversity and water regulation. This work also addresses metrology of dangers through two major sources of potential pollution: the soil and the atmosphere. Task 5, tasks 3 and 4 related, will suggest strategies that communities may use to manage pollution (including bioremediation and phytoremediation). Deliverables will be in each task and inter-task various scientific productions (disciplinary and interdisciplinary publications, participation in conferences), but also decision support for managing gardens for the purpose of city partners (eg, maps of risks). In particular, animations with these cities are planned.

Following the trend set by the Grenelle II law, the urban planning exercise is an appropriate setting for the integration of energy and climate issues in public policies. However, if it provides a framework for project planning, it does not support its implementation, and is an exercise limited to a given territory. To facilitate this implementation, the MApUCE project aims to integrate in urban policies and most relevant legal documents quantitative data from urban microclimate, climate and energy, in a process applicable to all cities of France. The primary objective of this project is to obtain climate and energy quantitative data from numerical simulations, focusing on building energy consumption in the residential and service sectors, which represents 41% of the final energy consumption. We propose to develop, using national databases, a generic and automated method for generating in France and at the scale of urban blocks, the urban architectural, geographical and sociological parameters necessary for energy simulations. In terms of models, the project will use the urban climate model TEB, which includes a building energy module. We will develop a model of energy consumer behaviour in order to further refine energy consumption calculations within TEB. The resulting climate-energy-behaviour coupled model will be applied to a broad range of French cities, to establish a climate-related energy diagnosis across France for current or future (2050) climates. The second objective of the project is to propose a methodology to integrate quantitative data in legal proceedings and urban policies. We plan to work on all planning documents to identify the potential levers for change and the relevant scales regardless of the territories and engineering in place. We will analyse the legal documents to determine how the existing legal systems integrate or not the energy-climate issues. We will then study the implementation policies and few “best cases” in order to evaluate their performances. Finally, based on urban planning agencies requirements, we will define vectors to pass on quantified energy-climate data to legal urban planning documents. These vectors have to be understandable by urban planners and contain the relevant information. These could be urban climate maps. The relevance of the project is to integrate these vectors in the documents and practices that have the greatest potential. Three experiments are planned in Toulouse, Aix en Provence and La Rochelle to confront the developed tools to actual planning approaches. To meet these challenges, the project is organized around strongly interdisciplinary partners in the following fields: law, urban climate, building energetics, architecture, sociology, geography and meteorology, as well as the national federation of urban planning agencies. In terms of results, the cross-analysis of input urban parameters and urban micro-climate-energy simulated data will be available on-line as standardized maps for each of the studied cities. The urban parameter production tool as well as the models will be available as open-source. Finally, in response to the main goal of the project, a guide providing a method of implementation in different legal and incentive documents will be produced. It will identify the levers that improve the implementation of energy savings and climate management policies by integrating them into planning mechanisms "at the right time, at the right place, with the right tool".