Zone to Defend
Evicted ZADs have amongst other things contested the construction of an electricity substation, a motorway and a facility for the storage of nuclear waste.
There have been ZADs in the departments of Aveyron, Bas-Rhin, Doubs, Isère, Loire-Atlantique, Meuse, Seine-Maritime, Tarn and Yvelines.
[7] In France, the most famous antecedents of the ZAD movement are the Larzac struggle (1971–1981),[8] the protests against the proposed nuclear power plant at Creys-Malville, in Isère (1977), and at Plogoff in the 1970s and 1980s.
[15][16][17] Activists began a solidarity project called ZAD Patate in 2013, which opposed the destruction of market gardens on the plain of Montesson.
In the Yvelines department, twenty kilometres to the west of central Paris, 400 small holdings were producing half of all the salad greens consumed in the capital.
The ZAD du Triangle at Gonesse, to the north of Paris, was set up to counter plans by Auchan and Wanda Group to build a shopping centre called EuropaCity.
[27] A collective to protect the triangle of land at Gonesse was formed in 2011 and at times, for example in October 2019, tent occupations were used as part of the tactics to resist construction.
[31] Activists attempted to set up a ZAD in March 2016 to resist the construction of a quarry for a new motorway in the Bager forest, which is located at Oloron-Sainte-Marie, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department near to the border with Spain.
[39] The ZAD du Carnet was occupied in late August in order to stop the preparatory works for the expansion of the port of Saint-Nazaire in the Loire-Atlantique department.
[52] There was a "windy week" in 2016, in which more cabins were built on the terrain of 7 hectares, with people coming to help out from other ZADs such as Bure, Roybon and the Susa Valley.
[42] The ZAD at Bure, in the Meuse department, protested against the expansion of a nuclear waste storage facility known as the Meuse/Haute Marne Underground Research Laboratory.
[16] Since 2004, there has been an anti-nuclear Maison de la Résistance (House of Resistance) in the centre of Bure since 2004, which acts as headquarters for the protests.
[59] In November 2020, the squatters appealed a decision made by the municipality of La Sarraz to withdraw the permission of residence from a house used as their base.
[44] Land located at Mont-Saint-Aignan, in the Seine-Maritime department north of Rouen, was occupied in December 2012 by activists concerned by its sale to Immochan (now part of Auchan), a property development company.
[10] The site was four hectares and fifty people turned it into an organic farm, fighting the plan of Immochan to build a shopping centre.
[45][61] The ZAD du Moulin was established in 2017 to resist the building of the A355 motorway also known as GCO (French: Grand contournement ouest) near Strasbourg in the Bas-Rhin department.
Members of the European Parliament Karima Delli and José Bové had joined the protestors in solidarity with their struggle to stop the road.
Located in the Loire-Atlantique department near to Nantes, it is a very large mostly agricultural terrain of 1,650 hectares (4,100 acres) which became nationally famous and has resisted several concerted attempts by the French state to evict it.
[47] The ZAD Rhineland was formed in 2020 to protect the village of Lützerath in the North Rhine-Westphalia state of Germany from demolition by RWE, which wants to expand the Garzweiler surface mine.
[48] The ZAD at Roybon, Isère, between Lyon and Grenoble, was created to oppose the proposed construction of a Center Parcs on the Chambarand plateau.
[68] The court agreed with environmentalist concerns regarding wastewater processing from a site with a maximum capacity of 5,600 people and also how the water table would be affected, with 76 hectares of wetland under threat.
[69] Pierre & Vacances announced in July 2020 that they were scrapping the plans to build and the ZAD responded that after six years it had no intention of disbanding.
[49] The demonstrations to protect the biodiversity of the wetlands in the area threatened by the proposed Sivens Dam resulted in the ZAD du Testet, which existed from 2011 until 2015.
[50] On 17 July 2020, activists from ANV-COP21 and Extinction Rebellion occupied land in Les Vaites on the east side of Besançon, as part of protests against an eco-development of 1150 apartments.
