Vernon

How can the site contribute to the adaptable city?

The site presented here includes a major part of the centre city. It should integrate and reinforce the policy begun by the municipality to improve the Seine Axis. Rooting the amenities of the inner city in a development of those naturel spaces that shape its context, large landscapes marked by typography and hydrography, is essential. This new equilibrium between city and nature doesn’t preclude an intensification of urban activities facilitating conciliation and consistency between urban structural elements and an evolution of uses and practices to attract a new population. Urban transformations need to be considered in contexts of actors and resources, with limited means and in an era of the post-carbon city, calling for efficient management and a pooling of spaces and community facilities.
Restore through identity and uses an urban coherence to the city’s motley grouping of neighbourhoods that public space barely manages to hold together, is also to postulate on the future of open development proposals that include sociological developments and long term innovation.
To make the city an attractive place to live, to develop longer-stay tourism and a make it a seductive, undeniable milestone for people visiting Giverny.

City strategy

The city, located on the edge of île de France in a context of major upheaval (arrival of major transport infrastructures, RER and SNCF), needs to reconcile its structural elements (infrastructure, landscape heritage, urban heritage) justify a vision of development that is specific, visible but measured.
At the heart of the Seine Axis between Paris and Rouen, issues of territorial development are numerous: developing infrastructure, attracting and developing economic activities, promoting tourism, reappropriating the banks of the Seine, recovering the industrial-military brownfields, maintaining the commercial fabric of the city centre, attracting new populations, controlling urban sprawl.
A complete understanding of the transformation of the banks of the Seine is part of the agenda, embodied in the organization of an international competition for urban planning and development for the area of the banks of the Seine. New urban forms are prescribed which seek to enhance the natural landscape in an ecological approach.
The CAPE and the Commune within the framework of Europan are partners in an ambitious policy favouring the study of long-term development for an urban project covering a territory between the Seine and the railway tracks. It will restore a coherency to all the neighbourhoods involved and breathe a genuine revival into the urban fabric through proposals for the transformation of public spaces as well as the built environment.

Site definition

The commune of Vernon lies along both banks of the Seine crossed by a bridge with heavy traffic. Incorporated in CAPE, it is about 45 minutes by train from Paris Gare St-Lazare and 30 minutes from Rouen.
The ambitious policy of planned urban development responds to contemporary needs based on the following findings:

- Within the study area, the Seine River and its banks have very little impact on the life of inhabitants and visitors; it is strange how "the river runs through the city without stopping". The entry points to the city are being reorganized. The highways along the Seine and rail lines to the southwest produce continuous urban breaks.
- Within the project area, the neighbourhood around the train station is in poor condition and has to be transformed. The public areas are notoriously lacking in definition, their image and uses are confused.

The urban fabric is punctuated by heritage buildings and has a certain quality. Nevertheless, there is a general feeling of a motley atmosphere resulting from urban sprawl. The city centre, rebuilt after the war, is deplorable, even congested and sometimes dilapidated. The relationship to the Seine and its banks is not serene.
The recovery of the banks of the Seine and the transformation of the city centre neighbourhoods would have actual repercussions for lifestyle and activities proposed by the city. The station and the surrounding neighbourhood (second most frequented station in Normandy and main arrival point for 600,000 visitors a year to Museum of Giverny) are to be rethought in an emblematic way. Reconstruction possibilities through original approaches adapted to the complex urban identity can renovate the too out-dated image of the Centre.

Future of the site in relation to the site family and to Adaptability

To reveal the potentials of the city while respecting the integrity of the existing and to elaborate proposals capable of setting into motion the changes, applicants are encouraged to identify and seize the levers that are going to give added value to the site.
To invent a innovative dialogue between existing city productive of energy and uses and the nature city, to better organize the tensions between local and trans-locales activities, by taking the measure of the possible effects of one on the other, they will propose strategies open to phases of projects adaptable or even reversible. From this context, the long-term scenarios will be extracted.
Today "traversed" for functional reasons, (the D.6015, the bridge, the gardens of Giverny), the city is committed to a brave urban policy seeking, in a context of limited resources and means, a balance between housing, amenities, shops, leisure activities, in order to better attract a young and active population.
The location of Vernon on both banks of the Seine encourages a better sharing of identity, a more affirmed connection between neighbourhoods, covered in the study site. The project site identifies the specific themes to federate.

- Give priority to a possible appropriation of the Seine by the population (quality of the banks and natural setting), which will impact the urban fabric and lives. Public space and the network of city centre streets, fertile supports for enhancing the urban space, the successive sequences of voids and their porosity can, on various scales of intervention, be remodelled.
- Punctual intervention on projects, buildings or conversion of buildings will improve the built environment.
- Finally, to establish a new urban hub around the train station and program an urban renewal satisfying the expectations of the users, exploring scenarios that create new links between neighbourhoods and adopting resilience as an issue in this context of major upheavals.
- The work calls for a dialogue with the future laureates on the subject of the banks of the Seine, seeking a shared, coherent and operational strategy.