How to conciliate densification and quality of urban areas ?
Prof. Emmanuel Rey of the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) was the guest speaker of the radio program InterCités of 22nd June 2011 on the Radio Suisse Romande. The interview allowed to mention issues in relation with sustainable urban development and to outline some new strategies to conciliate urban densification and architectural quality.
The radio program InterCités tackles with a guest speaker, live every morning, two press files presenting themes which animate the Swiss metropolis and its numerous urban centers linked by a dense interconnecting social, political, scientific and media network. During this program, Prof. Emmanuel Rey detailed more specifically the issues related to the emergence of the sustainable city and the contribution of the architectural project for this objective.
Urban sprawl and territorial functional dissociation not only result in an inefficient use of land and a significant impact on the landscape, but also an increase in infrastructure costs and environmental impacts. These official reports lead to question the tendencies of urbanization in recent decades and aim at reorienting the development of buildings towards the interior. In a durability optic, this return to the cities is nevertheless not limited and by far only to quantitative aspects and implies research of quality understood in a large sense.