Suburban Street Patterns at Stake. Evaluating the effects of local contexts between street patterns in subdivisions, property values and socio-occupational trajectories in the western suburbs of Paris

Open Access

Abstract

Paper submitted to Environment & Planning B, Sept. 2012. Editor's decision: Major revasion and resubmission, Dec. 2012. Paper withdrawn by the authors (2013). Published open access as a working paper This paper aims at classifying the local contexts of property price and socioeconomic changes in the southwestern suburban areas of the Paris metropolitan region, municipalities where single family planned housing developments and subdivisions are preeminent in morphology. Data from the Paris Chamber of Notaries (1996-2006) have been analyzed in a GIS at the municipal and subdivision levels. The resulting typologies describe property value change (using smoothing and multivariate analysis) and trajectories of social and occupational status of seller and buyer pairs in properties located in subdivisions and planned developments. This is compared to another typology of residential subdivisions according to street patterns and public vs. private street structure (loops, lollipops, dead-ends, hierarchical street patterns; gated and non-gated status). The paper engages an exploratory discussion of combinations, spatial arrangements and correlations between the three typologies, focusing on two main issues: how the different types of street patterns correlates with the housing price structure at the municipal level over time (1996-2006); and to what extent dominant street patterns and residential morphologies are related to social change, analyzed in terms of seller-buyer pairs. This exploratory research highlights the multi-scalar issues that are to be analyzed together to get a better understanding of social and spatial change on the urban edge and its intricate contexts: residential morphology, rent-seeking strategies at different geographical levels, neighborhood street patterns and developers planning strategy, municipal trajectories and regional planning.