Building the City of Tomorrow, One Community at a Time

Urban planning rarely makes for dinner-table conversation. But the Ville de Demain (City of Tomorrow) programme has been doing something quietly radical: bringing residents, local authorities, and designers into the same room to talk about what they actually want from the streets, parks, and public buildings around them. The initiative sits at the intersection of urban policy and lived experience, which is precisely what makes it worth paying attention to.

What the Programme Actually Does

Ville de Demain is a framework that encourages cities and towns to rethink their built environments with sustainability, social cohesion, and everyday usability in mind. Rather than top-down masterplanning, it prioritises local consultation and iterative design. Projects under its umbrella have tackled everything from improving pedestrian connectivity in neglected neighbourhoods to reimagining underused public squares as genuine gathering spaces. The idea is straightforward: a city works better when the people living in it have a say in how it is shaped.

Nicolas Régnier is one of the architects and urban thinkers who has been associated with this kind of participatory design approach. His work reflects a broader shift in the profession away from signature buildings and toward something less glamorous but arguably more important, the quality of the spaces between buildings, the corridors of daily life that most people navigate without a second thought. He has spoken publicly about the importance of what is sometimes called the "fo," a shorthand in francophone urban design circles for the fond urbain, the background fabric of a city as opposed to its landmark monuments. It is the fo, the ordinary streets, courtyards, and transitional spaces, that determines whether a city feels liveable or alienating.

Why the "Fo" Matters to You

If you have ever walked through a neighbourhood and felt inexplicably comfortable, or conversely uneasy, without being able to say why, you have already experienced the fo at work. Good urban background fabric is generous with shade, offers places to pause, connects rather than fragments. It is rarely the result of a single grand gesture but of accumulated small decisions made over time.

Programmes like Ville de Demain matter because they create the institutional space for those decisions to be made thoughtfully. They are slow work, and unglamorous. But they are the work that, in ten or twenty years, you will feel in your bones every time you step outside.