Europan 6

IN-BETWEEN CITIES
Architectural Dynamics and New Urbanity

European towns are themselves made up of several towns. For the most part they have a stable urban centre with a heritage value, born of urban development that went on through to the middle of the 20th century. They also have modern areas, the fruit of 1960s to 1980s zoning, forming juxtaposed urban fragments, or scattered in the middle of networks – estates of large blocks of flats, clusters of individual houses, business/industrial zones, new towns, etc.

Included in this patchwork are older urban areas whose origins go back to the 18th, 19th, and first half of the 20th centuries, when the centre extended outside the “city limits”. Inner suburbs, industrial districts, urbanised villages, de-militarised, and other zones, these fringes are structured around a network of routes that are a combination of old rural roads and new road networks (access routes in the town, the road patterns created by estates of houses or several blocks of flats). Today they have become interstitial fragments between centres and modern towns.

On the original structuring network, the constructed elements have developed gradually in line with needs, giving birth to a multiplicity of spaces that are a mix of high-rise urban flats, rows of housing giving onto the street, individual houses, industrial premises, warehousing, contemporary transport routes.

EUROPAN 6 proposes to explore these areas in order to reveal their latent identities, and dynamise their development.

WHY? POTENTIALS FOR NEW WAYS OF LIFE AND FORMS OF URBANITY

Abandoned by modern planning of the extended town – except as places to pass through or use as service zones, these long-time socially and physically marginalised areas have, today, become strategic pieces in the formation of the contemporary jigsaw town; this is thanks to their location, and to their urban heritage, whose qualities await revelation and enhancement. By putting new functional features on offer, these areas can create the conditions for new forms of urban living. These will be born out of the crossbreeding of existing urban values supported by the strength of their social and cultural collective memory, and new forms corresponding to the evolution of urban ways of life.

This mutation is the consequence of new social and spatial dynamics which seek to profit from the advantages of locality and context of these territories situated between towns.

- lifestyle dynamic with a demand for diversification of forms peri-central of housing adapted to different populations (young households, students, the elderly), and certain integrated services such as local shops or shopping centres;
- cultural dynamic linked to free time and the greater importance of urban leisure with a demand for access to specific amenities (cinemas, theatres, cafés, concert halls, etc.) in addition to social and sporting amenities;
- touristic dynamic if territories have a history that enables them to be included in an urban cultural circuit that can generate spaces of interactive memory
- employment dynamic linked to new technologies with the creation of small hi-tech businesses, or quality craft businesses, seeking a certain centrality or possibilities for working from home
- urban network dynamic, based on transport hubs linking: train/tramway, car/bus, car-parks/tramway, etc.

These dynamics provide the opportunity to generate, in different combinations according to context, composite programmes that blend housing, work, leisure, and transport.

In terms of urban management, local authorities, often elected representatives of communes adjoining the town centre, planning departments and regional or local architectural departments, have started work on the urban transformation of these pieces of town, with policies with varying levels of dynamism. Private developers are increasingly interested in these areas, in order to respond to demand from a new clientèle. In terms of urban management, these situations therefore offer a field of investigation for implementation processes and innovative design approaches which bring together town and private investors, public and private logics.

HOW ? ENHANCEMENT OF EXISTING QUALITIES AND ARCHITECTURAL MODERNISATION

By structuring their road systems and through spatial "hybridity", these intermediary systems offer not only an existing outline and living memory of an ordinary urban history, but also have the development potential of a contemporary town ripe for improvement, based on a modernisation of spaces, to create a complex, intense, pluralist, modern, and coherent town.

This can be done as follows:

In terms of networks by:

- restructuring the routes and existing road systems as a function of morphologies and means of contemporary mobility;
- opening up a multiplicity of complementary means of mobility: private car, public transport (bus, tramway) and bicycle.

In terms of constructed elements by: 

- taking into account the parcelling of land and partial land consolidation as a function of coherent planning logic;
- densification of lightly built-up areas – interiors of blocks, vacant plots, zones that interface with the modern networks;
- with new constructions to replace the old – warehousing without value, dilapidated buildings, etc.;
- rehabilitation of buildings with heritage value, or worthy of converting to a new use;
- restructuring of urban groupings of buildings that are heterogeneous objects;
- integration of ecological requirements into the architecture.

In terms of public space, and environmental quality by:

- enhancement of existing public spaces (streets, places, parks, squares, nature reserves);
- insertion of new public spaces interl-inked, both with those that exist, and with the new morphological structure;
- treatment of transition spaces between constructed spaces and public spaces;
- landscaping;
- resource management.

Given the image downgrading these peripheral areas of the town have suffered, which means they are often in a dilapidated state and not considered worthy in heritage terms, compared with the town centre and functional areas, there is a strong demand for an enhancement of their identity by architectural modernisation through morphological restructuring, typological diversification, a quality of architectural image, and innovations in terms of public space. This demand gives EUROPAN a strategic role to play in this new "urban market".

FOUR CATEGORIES OF SITE 

In terms of urbano-architectural scale, this theme enables the definition of large scale (maximum 10 hectares) urban situations for consideration, in association with operational sites of between 1 and 3 hectares, in one or several parts.

The sites – all chosen in these interstitial urban situations should fall into one of four categories:

- disused land: sites whose functions have become obsolete, allowing for new development opportunities;
- the interrupted town: areas in old or modern suburbs, unfinished plots, post-war chunks of social housing containing a heterogeneous range of constructions that calls for restructuring;
- absorbed villages: previously rural structures that have become caught up with by the town, and from which dense but low rise residential areas can be conceived;
-peri-central urban hubs: sites that have been downgraded over time through lack of networks, but which can be redynamised by introducing up-to-date transport infrastructure (roads–car-parks– tramways or bus, train–bus, etc.) enabling links between forms of transport and enabling the creation of micro-urban polarities.