Les Petits Ventres-Villes

TEAM PORTRAIT

INTERVIEW
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1. How did you form the team for the competition?
Our team was formed during our studies at architecture school through common relationships. We share the conviction of using our skills for virtuous and sustainable purposes at the service of the majority.

2. How do you define the main issue of your project, and how did you answer on this session main topic, Living cities? How did the issues on metabolic and inclusive vitalities and the questions raised by the site mutation meet?
A Living City finds its genome in an urban ecosystem that promotes an ecology of natural and inhabited environments, a social ecology and an economic ecology. One of the main conditions for the existence of this ecosystem can only be achieved with a re-territorialization process by re-creating the link of consciousness between individuals-inhabitants and territories and by re-instating neglected practices and repressed memories. Spatial inequalities between individuals is the main problematic to which our project responds.
These inequalities have been favored by the latest innovations in mobility and telecommunications: the democratization of private cars, high-speed trains and airlines have expanded the notion of proximity. New telecommunication technologies such as social networks and soon metaverses have favored the development of a "telematic agora" (Magnaghi). The appearance of this immaterial cyberspace "dispenses" the individual from going to the physical space to socialize; daily gloom and mediocratization of "urban" spaces are as many reasons to withdraw at home behind a "connected" screen: causes and consequences merge and feed each other.
These innovations have often been wrongly presented like a solution to territorial fractures. Indeed bringing a high-speed Internet network to isolated/abandoned territories isn’t enough to create jobs. Same for the dematerialization of administrative procedures and certain public services which deprives individuals of interlocutors who are the guarantors of their recognition as citizens and inhabitants of a territory. Even if they have encouraged a decompartmentalization of minds and cultures, new mobilities are transforming the job market and allowing an exponential distancing of living/working places, making individuals even more subjugated and deterritorialized. Accessibility to natural environments, public spaces, community services, infrastructures and equipments is not equally distributed throughout the territory. These markers of inequality have been revealed and reinforced by the CoVid-19 crisis. The resonance of "Care" is therefore twofold: in order to take care of the other and ourselves, we must take care of the milieu between us. Taking care of the milieu consists first of all in preserving its integrity by becoming aware of its fragility. It is then necessary to encourage its habitability and urbanity by identifying its endogenous qualities, preferring a meticulous transformation of existing structures, capitalizing on the "already there"/the "common good”.