The Val-de-Marne, the "water departement" - A global and forceful landscape policy at the department level

Abstract

The integration of a landscape specialist in a department administration necessarily leads to a new set of relations between the various services and can allow an harmonization of all interventions and financing actions, in the framework of coherent operations. The example of the Val-de-Marne department is, in this respect, quite an illustration of that fact, since strong landscape wills and competences have led to the vote, by the department assembly, of a new 15-year river development plan, which represents an investment of about 500 million French francs. The department set up an interservices workshop at the valley level (the Seine) that allows to better understand the town planning problems and to integrate single operations into coherent programs, whose goal is to redefine the department river landscape and to work in depth on the use of plants.