The loi relative à la solidarité et au renouvellement urbains (loi SRU) of 2000 reformed French planning to promote social mix, compact development and coordinated metropolitan growth. It replaced the old master plans with the territorial coherence scheme (SCoT) and the local urban plan (PLU), linking land use to transport and housing. Its best-known provision, Article 55, requires many urban communes to ensure that at least twenty per cent, later twenty-five per cent, of their housing is social housing, with financial penalties for those that fall short. The law tied planning explicitly to the goals of solidarity and curbing sprawl.
It made a binding social-housing quota a central instrument of French planning, embedding social mix and anti-sprawl objectives into the law governing every commune.