Genève (CH)

SITE / CONTEXT

The ambition of Geneva’s public stakeholders is to respond to the climate emergency through long- term planning, aimed at both decarbonisation and the resilience of the agglomeration.Voted in 2024, the “Strategy for the Arborisation of the Urban Area” calls for its transaltion into innovative spatial, functional and social solutions. Thus, the Moving (with) trees project meets the needs of society in the short, medium and long term through ideation, prototyping and upscaling.
The EUROPAN competition gives Geneva stakeholders the opportunity to prefigure on a 1:1 scale (research-by-design) a project demonstrating this strategy, thanks to a tactical urbanism method, based on key factors of life, uses and mobility.
Trees designed to create atmospheres of freshness and well-being will initially be installed on a test site imbued with urbanity, diversified mobility, intensity of use and culture. They will then – during summer – be moved in a processual way to similar sites to multiply the advantages of arborization in the urban area.The procession of the trees and the events scheduled for each resettlement site aim to change civic practices and redefine the meaning and use of the urban landscape with a view to its climate resilience.
The perimeter of reflection corresponds to the “dense city”, an urban expanse more linked to the densities of buildings and uses than to a strict administrative perimeter.
In the current state of maturation of public policies relating to climate resilience, the project site can only be taken as a field of exercise and ideation, intended for prototyping, according to the political will, the support of the competent services and the acceptance of the public.
The ideation perimeter is the Place des Charmilles, the starting point of the “itinerant forestation” project.The objective is to carry out research on the multiple temporal (tree life, procession, mobility, rhythms, seasons, etc.), spatial (square, street, façade, full-empty, street furniture, etc.) and social (individual, group, age groups, cultures, temporary uses, etc.) relationships resulting in a new urban scene specific to the “new climatic regime” (B. Latour). The sequence of sites, the route of the trip and the programming must include the following considerations:
1. The sites that make up the procession are key places of mobility.
2. They are imbued with urbanity and intensity of use.
3. They are or can become places of cultural identification and heritage redefinition.

QUESTIONS TO THE COMPETITORS

The competition should allow for exploration and questioning of:
1. The context of future active and diverse mobility
What will the public square of 2050 look like?
How do collective, active, and resilient mobility systems generate new spaces?
2. The new definition of public space and its uses
What types of uses can urban squares generate as shelters?
How does citizen participation contribute to this dynamic?
How can architecture and landscape, through a “forestation” project, create a space for raising awareness of the ecological emergency?
How do collective spatial experience, the didactic and event-based nature of the project contribute to citizen engagement and climate impact? What indicators and