Le Palais (FR)

Inhabited milieu's challenges

Le Palais is the largest of the 4 municipalities of Belle-Île-en-Mer. It refers to the specificities of any island situation defined by a rare space, tightly delimited. Its port, the main entrance to the island, welcomes visitors and goods daily. It extends into the ria which descends from the heights where rainwaters, the only source of drinking water, are stored. The city center of Le Palais is constrained in a space surrounded by topography and surrounded by a vast perimeter wall whose military history preserved a very wooded landscape within the municipality itself. The agricultural specificity of the island, maintained and anchored in the local identity, contributes to its ecological and landscape richness. Tourism is one of the main economic resources for its future, although the influx from outside partly increases the smallness of the island economic space. It structures and impacts the island, which goes from 6,000 inhabitants to 45,000 in the summer season.A supply of housing that is difficult and expensive to renovate contrasts with a supply of property for sale or to rent at very high prices, gradually making it almost impossible for the Palatines to have access to housing. The transit of goods generates an additional cost of the daily basket and the fuel price.The effects of climate change, visible with the hazards of marine submersion, have become annual. Both drinking water and food autonomy are fragile with new episodes of drought.The Palace is part of the “Petites Villes de Demain” program aimed at improving the quality of life in small central cities and their rural areas. Laboratory of current planetary conditions - tension on resources, social inequalities, climatic risks and their uncertain consequences - the site is a place of reflection around the singularities specific to the island and of storytelling of this island culture.

Questions to competitors

Le Palais has several expectations. First of all, re-questioning the ground of public spaces that are currently saturated, from the port to the city center to find new continuities.Then thinking of various offers of housing and services proposing new ways of living, more inclusive, accessible to islanders, seasonal workers and tourists, adapted to the aging of the population.
The proposals must open up to singular devices based on urban design, architecture and landscape. The approach of the Care must, by properly measuring them, take into account the existing relationships and solidarities. The municipality is actually far from the habits of consumption of the continent : the finiteness of resources and their management, imposes itself today even more as an invariant of any project, in terms of feeder, of constructive methods, supply and energy management. In addition, new equities are expected between island inhabitants and secondary residents, neo-ilians and visitors, who in different temporalities are interdependent and require new places of symbiotic relationships between them and with the island.
Finally, Le Palais is looking for a resilience that will bring nature and culture together: global warming, visible in the transformations at work in the island’s ecosystem, warns about the impact on its biodiversity. The concept of Care must also be accompanied by appropriate administrative, technical, legal or tax mechanisms. How, through project processes or operational assemblies, can we act on the preservation of biodiversity and maintain the balance between islanders and non-islanders? The actors of Le Palais expect from this session answers leading to new equalizations allowing to find new equities for the living.What are the experiments carried out elsewhere that could find new developments here or what are the new devices to be invented?