Open Space Fabric

Team Point of View

The area between Onex, Bernex and Confignon is a very heterogeneous urban fabric, highly influenced by the East-West axis due to its position in relation to Geneva and the Rhône. The main strategy is therefore to differently densify and do it through the definition of strategic open spaces.
The existing plot pattern is the guide for the proposed network of urban voids, making the new development compatible with the current urban fabric and with property rights. These open spaces are reserved to become squares, patios or orchards, always according to the needs and desires of the community. The landscape progressively changes, an additional layer of public and collective spaces allows all actors to intervene in the process at different moments.
We propose a process rather than a closed project that will emerge from the application of technical rules, the participation of the stakeholders and its interaction with the urban, social and ecological context.
A representative stripe of land, with a North-South orientation to get all this diversity without losing the East-West perspective, is used as an example. Through this abstraction we can better analyse the urban fabrics to propose different densification strategies. The stripe is a very useful tool out of which we can more easily establish a coherent set of rules to apply to other territories with similar characteristics.

Jury Point of View

The proposition revolves around three main objectives:
- The articulation of a will to preserve elements on the site and a need for resilience;
- The work on the potential of the site and not on the basis of a tabula rasa;
- The search for urban forms that stimulate the birth of new community forms.
A North-South ‘slice’ illustrates the process reflecting the consistency of the proposition. The preview explicitly conveys the main ideas of the proposition and opens up the fields of application to be developed in more detail.