Lying just 3km from the city centre, the much-celebrated planned suburban community of Vauban, has a similar environmentally conscious ethos at its heart. Here, civic involvement goes hand in hand with “collective building” – where citizens buy a piece of land together and build an apartment building themselves, instead of individually buying an apartment from a development company – and ambitious environmental policy. Basically, “people are more green, more alternative and more social,” Hoffmann said.