What future for the CAUEs?

The Fédération Nationale des CAUE is calling for consultation with the CAUEs' partners in response to the draft bill that threatens the 1977 law on architecture.

The draft bill allows a département's deliberative assembly to create a groupement d'intérêt public (GIP), a public interest group with responsibility for local public engineering, bringing together a range of bodies, including the Conseil d'Architecture, d'Urbanisme et de l'Environnement (CAUE). It removes the dedicated funding that has so far safeguarded the CAUEs' independence, and channels it to the GIP instead.

If the text were to stand as it is, the future of the CAUEs, which carry out a public service mission, would clearly be under threat. The continued provision of a distinctive service, at once cultural, educational and technical, to part of their audience (private individuals planning to build, citizens, architects and project managers, craftspeople, other professionals of the built environment, and government departments) would no longer be guaranteed.

Their independence, which in particular guarantees the ability to promote public debate and to take up an issue on their own initiative in the public interest, and which rules out any suggestion of bias in the advice given to local authorities at the earliest stage, would be called into question.

The MOP law would be set aside. It currently defines the role of the client (maîtrise d'ouvrage) by specifying responsibilities that cannot be delegated, and by establishing a hierarchy between what happens upstream of the decision to carry out development work and what happens downstream.

Finally, what would disappear is the funding based on a dedicated tax revenue, which stems from the public interest mission attached to the CAUEs and has endured for 35 years.

- source FNCAUE -