Entrecroisements / Crossing-Overs

2013
The Europan competition is a step in the long evolution of a territory. Rather than looking for a project that looks attractive in the short-term but offers little long-term potential, we tried to identify the territorial foundations of the project.
Shifting the positioning to a larger scale and to long-term dynamics directly fed into the project’s structure and scale. A possibilities plan summarises its fundamental organisational principles, which may trigger interventions on different timescales without losing overall coherence.
The project combines three main themes that relate to different timeframes and systems of actors: “adapting the village”, “adapting agriculture” and “adapting housing”.

2013-2018

Following the competition, a meeting was held between the clients and the three Europan teams of the Fosses site, to implement a consultation with the objective of selecting one of the teams to develop the project on the initial site. The Crossings Over project team was chosen as the winner of this mission, entitled "feasibility study and development of the project to enhance, revitalize and dynamize the village center of Fosses". The objectives, as defined in the work program, were to stimulate and animate a process of mobilization of the inhabitants, to explore different constraints and assets for the implementation of the urban project, and to define a phasing and an operating mode.
The central idea of the Crossings Over project included in the specifications was the importance of the agricultural dimension : "Several specific issues will have to be examined and deepened by the team in order to extract precise guidelines, to confirm their feasibility and the conditions of realization: (...) the development of an economic sector based on local agriculture, bio-intensive market gardening (...)". Based on the team's proposal, many actors were involved in the study, such as the inhabitants during weekly meetings, but also the associative and institutional actors through individual interviews. These collegial work sessions led to the redefinition of the site and the addition of project elements. First of all, the meeting with the Departmental Council and the Basin Syndicate made it possible to develop a project on the marsh, in parallel with its classification as a Sensitive Natural Area (ENS). Then, citizen participation led to the proposal of a "pedestrian loop" bypassing the departmental road.
The study was delivered in May 2018 by the team. An architectural competition was launched in July 2021 for the interpretive center in the center of the village which the team did not win.