A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the planned IKEA development nearby. Yesterday the mayor of Mouans Sartoux (the village most affected by the development) organized a fairly large "manifestation" to protest the development and his fear that the village of Mouans Sartoux would be "Ikeasphyxie"ated by the development. As I wrote last time, I was generally in favour of the Ikea idea but have become far less in favour now that I see the actual development plans.
The problem is not directly NIMBYism, I'd like something IKEA on my doorstep (more or less) when it comes to buying stuff, it's just that I think the plan is misguided and ignores the traffic chaos that will likely result. In fact if you look at the plans over at the pro Ikea blog, you see that they are spending loadsa money to cover the car parks and make the thing look nice but hardly spending any money on building sensible traffic access points. This, to put it bluntly, is stupid. The area where the IKEA is to be built is not, to put it bluntly, one of the jewels of the Alpes Maritimes, rather it is an area already somewhat blighted by ugly warehouses and other light industry. Thus landscaping Ikea is almost as sensible as the mayor of Grasse's blowing of road repair money beautifying roundabouts in the middle of industrial/commercial areas.
Hence, as I say, the reason why I have more sympathy for the anti-Ikea group, and the mayor of Mouans Sartoux is undoubtedly one of the leading members of this camp. Of course I have little doubt that were the Ikea development to be positioned within the municipal boundaries of Mouans Sartoux rather than about 50m away across the road in Mougins his protests would diminsh significantly. But the map below from the newsletter sent out about the protest shows why most inhabitants of Mougins don't care about the traffic issues and those in Mouans Sartoux do. The red shaded areas are the village centers for Mouans Sartoux and Mougins respectively. Only the people in the section of Mougins that abuts Mouans Sartoux (the quartier St Martin) are against Ikea and they in fact feel susfficiently aggrieved by the plan as to be petitioning to transfer themselves from Mougins to Mouans Sartoux. This would, in my opinion make sense and would probably result in the Ikea developmentitself becoming part of Mouans Sartoux, which would be ironic.
Anyway, yesterday we had at least 1000 people gathering in Mouans Sartoux to protest against the proposal. We were told to come in black mourning and to be creative, the protestors certanly did that as the pictures below show.
Blog Home : January 2007 : Permalink
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the planned IKEA development nearby. Yesterday the mayor of Mouans Sartoux (the village most affected by the development) organized a fairly large "manifestation" to protest the development and his fear that the village of Mouans Sartoux would be 
"Ikeasphyxie"ated by the development. As I wrote last time, I was generally in favour of the Ikea idea but have become far less in favour now that I see the actual development plans.
