The fight against unfit housing and the development of the port will be on the menu for the third and final day of President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Marseille on Wednesday. The day will however start with the traditional Council of Ministers, which will be held by videoconference, except for the members of the government who accompany the President of the Republic.
The housing sequence, to detail the means of fighting against unfit housing, will then take place during a visit to the Est Marseille residence, a degraded condominium known as the “Benza” city. With 40,000 slums and eight people dead in the collapse of two unsanitary buildings in the city center in November 2018 rue d’Aubagne, Marseille is particularly affected by the housing crisis.
A first operation will be the launch of an exceptional rescue plan for four large degraded private condominiums in the city, via operations to requalify degraded condominiums of national interest (Orcodin), a tool making it possible to “mobilize exceptional means of intervention and better fight against slum dealers,” Macron told the regional daily La Provence on Tuesday evening.
The town hall of Marseille also told AFP of these four planned Orcodin, as well as an intervention plan for other degraded private condominiums. This Orcodin system, launched since 2017 in Île-de-France, allows public authorities to expropriate or buy more easily to destroy or renovate, to finance work in common areas and to better take care of security issues.
At midday, the president will then go to the port of Marseille-Fos, one of the largest in the country, now chaired by his former Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner, at the head of the supervisory board. On Tuesday, the president had lunch with one of the main players in the port, Rodolphe Saadé, the boss of the shipowner CMA-CGM, a giant in the sector, based in the Marseille city. Mr. Macron reaffirmed on Tuesday evening that the future development of the Grand Port maritime de Marseille (GPMM) should be done in depth, in its hinterland, towards the Rhône and the Saône and as far as Bavaria, an industrial stronghold in the south of the Germany.
He also insisted on the development of new green industries, in particular around the production of hydrogen or renewable energies, with several projects on the important rights of way of the port towards Fos-sur-Mer, north of Marseille. But the issues are also on the scale of the city itself, the GPMM holding very large land reserves over which the municipality has no control. Paradoxically, the port facilities also block access to the coast in a good part of the city, in particular the northern districts, the poorest and most landlocked.
Another big issue is the pollution generated by the ships that still dock in the Marseille part of the port, in particular the ferries to the Maghreb and Corsica and the gigantic cruise liners that stop there. The port has started the electrification of the quays to avoid ships having to run their engines during stopovers, but still in a limited way. The president will then leave Marseille, which he presents as his favorite city, after this second three-day visit, exceptional in its duration.
