Rennes (FR)

Inhabited milieu's challenges

On the edge of the city of Rennes and in contact with the Blosne district (ANRU district undergoing restructuring), the site is part of the urban area’s green belt and opens onto a vast agricultural and natural plateau.The southern ring road (RN 136) constitutes a clear limit to the dense heart of the metropolis: the local authority has long favored a model of development through renewal within the green belt while enhancing the city-countryside network around the idea of the «Archipelago City».The site will be entirely vacated in 2027 following the relocation of the University Hospital Center. It is marked by a cross-shaped building (58,000 m2), a legacy of the 20th century built according to a model of hospital architecture from the late 1970s.
The competition aims to explore the field of possibilities to prefigure the reconversion of the South Hospital in a larger scale vision, urban and landscape, ecological and environmental.The project is not limited to the unique reconversion of the built heritage: Rennes Metropole plans to create a piece of city open to its environment and welcoming a diversity of uses: education and training, creative and productive activities, housing, urban logistics. It is an exemplary laboratory for experimenting with new tools for circular urban planning, taking into account urban metabolism and resource management.The theme of the living city here deals with nature (water, soil, biodiversity) and humans (social and economic inclusion), but also with «living architecture»: the project process must bring the site into a new life cycle, after 50 years of hospital life.

Questions to the competitors

The South Hospital site provides an opportunity to develop the theme of living cities in two intertwined aspects: imagining the return to use of a built heritage that is losing its initial function in order to adapt it to new, more diverse occupations that are likely to evolve over time; regenerating an artificial soil and re- establishing physical and ecological continuities with its environment.
On the scale of the strategic site: how can this site be reintegrated into the wider landscape and ecological continuities be reconstituted (renaturation of the Blosne river)? How to open it up to the Blosne district and attract new inhabitants? How to treat the interfaces between the city, the infrastructure and the surrounding countryside? How should the landscape perceived from the ring road be staged and what uses should be made of the area surrounding the infrastructure?
On the scale of the project site: how to revive this site and develop new activities? What to do with this built heritage, between reuse or reconstruction? The site is intended to become a destination, a marker of the metropolitan territory, a place of hospitality for the inhabitants of the Blosne district and the metropolis. Renne Metropolis wishes to make it a demonstrator of the sustainable city, a place of urban intensity offering both a high urban quality, services for daily life, a number of housing units and a particular relationship with nature, with attention paid to the proximity of agriculture and the countryside.