From today, Saturday June 1, all municipalities with less than 2,000 inhabitants must have given a name to all public roads, therefore to those which did not have one until now. All houses must also have a number. It is the result of a law passed two years ago, and which is therefore beginning to apply. This measure should make it easier for delivery people, postmen and even emergency services to work.
franceinfo: If we can simply use our GPS to find a place, we can say that it was about time anyway?
Jean Viard: Yes, we can say that, but at the same time, in the countryside, I who live there, I am one of the 1,800,000 French people who will have an address. Now I have one, they found an old path that went to my house. At the same time, it is another vision of the territory. Because basically, the postmen were people from the village, from the country, that’s how we recruited them.
The big challenge, when you were a postman, or when you were at the cash register behind the post office, was to manage to return to your village. Often it took a while, so they knew the territory, they knew the people. They knew that after the green shutters, there was Madame Michu who had three dogs. That was it, that was that relationship. And at worst, we spoke to each other: “Hello, do you know where they live”?
There, it’s disappearing, no one asks me anything anymore. Why did we do this? Because we have entered the civilization of delivery, and precisely, not by local people. I would say that it is the new consumer society, which has become more accentuated after covid, which requires this new policy, with all the debate, should we use metrics, that is- i.e. basically 612, which means that you are 600 meters from the Town Hall etc.
Where do we put the beginning of the street…
The Americans have been doing this for a very long time, which also lets you know if you’re going to go on foot or not. If it says 8214, you know you need to take another means of transportation. So that is fundamental. And the second thing is security. It’s true that we are in a security company, so if you call the fire brigade, if you have a heart attack, if there is a fire, it is certain that the more they have the exact address, the more quickly they are on the objective. But the heart of the debate is still the delivery society which is sad news from a symbolic point of view, and it is very good news from a technological point of view.
There are still many municipalities which have not yet changed their addresses or which are not going to do so in the coming months, they are behind schedule. There are approximately 20,000 out of the 35,000 municipalities in France to date, according to the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion. And in this case, moreover, if there is a problem with the firefighters, with the rescue forces who did not have an address, we could turn against the mayor of the municipality.
But what the figures also reveal is that there are 1 million buildings which, until now, did not have a valid address, in theory, does that seem huge?
But no, my house is very typical of that, for example, at home it was called the Revest, that is to say everything that is on the other side of the castle, it was immense, there was kilometers, names were designated in space. So we said the Revest, it meant the back of the castle. We didn’t have the same uses of the territory at all, and that’s what I was pointing out.
But at the same time, it’s also urbanization, it’s urban thinking somewhere. I worked in the 70s on land use plans. It was very complicated, because people had to represent on a map where they lived. So there, we are in imaginaries of space, and it is an urban imaginary which penetrates the countryside, because modern society is an urban society, and we must return there. But it’s true that it loses some of its charm.
And it’s true that it raises a lot of questions for small towns because it’s expensive too?
Absolutely, there is a question of money, because there are panels, it can cost 30 or 40,000 euros in small town halls and then, there is another debate, it is: do we remove old names? Because before there were the names of hamlets for example, which are disappearing. There was a mayor who had to resign because he removed all the signs from the hamlets and only put up modern things, and people screamed. And so he resigned in the face of the people’s revolt.
And now we have to create street names, since there are addresses to create, road names. How do we do it? What is a good street name, Jean Viard?
I don’t know, where I live, they gave old names. We can give them symbolic meanings. We could have decided, for example, that every second name will be a lady’s name. Currently, if you look at our cities, it’s almost just the names of gentlemen, including many warriors, some of whom had very questionable military works. We could have decided that 50% of street names are women’s names.