Marne-la-Vallée

How can the site contribute to the adaptable city?

Route de la Brie, which runs from the A4 motorway into the central part of the new town of Marne-la-Vallée, raises the question of urban divides and the future of residual spaces around the centres and neighbourhoods it crosses. The neighbourhoods, organised around parks, artificial lakes or green strips, which are the trademark of the new town, are separated by roads and successive roundabouts. They sometimes seem to be juxtaposed. The brief is to think about boundaries, residual interstitial spaces with uncertain purposes, the recycling and readaptation of these spaces, which suffer from a lack of legibility and appropriation. These spaces have significant potential, which can be exploited to devise new places of life and activity, to offer possibilities for densification or urban intensification.

City strategy

The Val Maubuée territory, 40 years after the creation of Marne-la-Vallée, is facing societal challenges of a new kind and is actively pursuing the urban changes and transformations needed to enhance its metropolitan attractiveness: revisiting the free public and private spaces that structure the neighbourhoods and blocks, and adapting them to modern uses and human practices; acting appropriately and inventively to foster new uses and the socio-economic balances of the town; making the links between neighbourhoods and the relations between housing and jobs more legible, facilitating residential movement, enhancing the spaces within housing estates. It has become essential to identify methods of intervention, by developing participatory action between all the stakeholders and residents concerned.

Site definition

The project site, set within inhabited neighbourhoods in Val Maubuée, is served by the Lognes and Noisiel RER stations, buses and roads of very different kinds: a sunken motorway-type expressway, the D499 (Route de la Brie), which links the A4 to the D199 (Route de la Marne), itself destined to become an urban boulevard. The districts are laid out on either side of the D499. Numerous roundabouts provide connections between neighbourhoods. Narrower streets and alleyways allow pedestrians to move between different places and to access the urban blocks. However, cars are everywhere, the dominant mode of transport. Possessing an exceptional heritage of vegetation and landscape, the site offers numerous private or public spaces, some very large managed by the local authority, some smaller, within urban blocks or set apart.

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

The site was presented at the European Intersession Forum in a thematic family headed: “how to convert physical obstacles into new connections?” This question relates to the layout and topography of the study site. However, globally the site fits in with the three themes of Europan 13 and the expected responses apply on all three levels: “object versus project” (from the planning of big development operations to the implementation of negotiated projects), “welfare state versus self-organisation” (from dependence on the State to the construction of new local partnerships), “segregation versus sharing” (from the separation of functions to a new fluidity of uses). The theme of the adaptable city takes on a particular significance in the context of a New Town, characterised by experimentation with new practices, in order to accommodate an urban heritage that is exceptional in urban and sociological, landscape and architectural, economic and cultural respects.