The Role of a City Agency in the Problem Spatialization: Lessons From Paris, Les Halles Toward The New Eu Agenda

The main goal of this contribution is to explore the role of the Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme (APUR) as a city agency (CA) in charge of sev-eral different tasks within the shift from urban renovation to urban form, concerning the city of Paris. This was possible thanks to a negotiation pro-cess involving diffe-rent institutions, as well as architects and urban design-ers, in which APUR took a major role on the technical, political and cultural level. This paper moves from the “comparative history” method and takes APUR as a case study to reflect upon the importance of the spatialization of the problems made by a CA to nurture and activate innovation in the urban policy-making process. Lessons from this case are drawn in the light of the current literature review on CA and policy im-plementation and innovation, as well as of EU urban agen-da pillars, in which CAs have a privileged posi-tion between top-down policies and bottom-up initiatives, but still missing a close relationship with the EU level. Recommendation con-cerning skills and methodologies for a CAs as wished in the current EU urban agenda are drawn by the APUR success case: deictic, resilient (adaptable), able to cata-lyse different cultural, political and architectonical views and connecting dif-ferent zones of transformation (not focusing on just one area). Eventually, this contribution acknowledges the crucial role of problems spatialization as the first step to analyse them. Their representation in space, usual responsi-bility of a CA, is even more crucial (and potentially influential) in the deci-sion-making process, in engaging the local system of stakeholders and in ef-fectively translating ideas into real ur-ban transformation projects.