Cutting - sewing - welding: how to (re)make the city?
Gare-Lac, Yverdon-les-Bains © LAST / EPFL
The 21st International meeting on urban planning of the APERAU (Association pour la promotion de l'enseignement et de la recherche en aménagement et urbanisme) took place from 16 to 21 June in Strasbourg and were entitled "Metropolises in the 21st century: Cut - sewing - welding: how to (re) make the city?". On this occasion, Dr. Martine Laprise presented the results of the SIPRIUS research project developed by the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
The traditional city, and its archetypal European representation of the medieval village, is built on the physical opposition with the rural space. The definition of the city is therefore partly established from a separation. In metropolises, this old structure, following successive cycles of urbanization proceeding by disjunction and connection, has given way to a multitude of cuts that give substance to a fragmented space. The cuts - morphological, functional, social, economic, environmental, historical or symbolic - are now located within cities; they are almost exclusively considered in a negative way, as "ruptures of urbanity" that must be reversed. Several questions can then be raised.
As part of these reflections, and more particularly to the problem of urban brownfield as a surface cut, the results of the SIPRIUS research project were presented during the "Brownfields and temporality" session of the conference. SIPRIUS proposes an operational monitoring tool designed to facilitate the integration of sustainability issues in urban brownfield regeneration projects.
Despite the strong quantitative and qualitative potential, the holistic integration of environmental, social and economic issues into urban brownfield regeneration projects is still far from systematic. In view of this, it appears necessary to have evaluation solutions rooted in urban planning practices, which allow promoting a proactive, structured and continuous integration of sustainability issues into the dynamics of urban brownfield regeneration projects. In other words, it is about setting up an operational monitoring tool specifically adapted to this type of project.
Test applications of the tool were carried out on three case studies in Belgium, France, and Switzerland thus making it possible to probe its added value. Furthermore, interactions with the stakeholders of the case studies have highlighted that the tool facilitates the integration of sustainability issues and provides knowledge for better decision-making, from the initial situation to the regenerated site. It also appears from the interactions with the stakeholders that, whereas the use of such a tool implies a change in the management of these projects, it could be put into practice in the manner of a "dashboard" offering valuable decision support.