Post-carbon neighborhoods
Freilager Zurich © Georg Aerni
Invited by the City of Yverdon-les-Bains Urban Planning Department, the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) represented by Prof. Emmanuel Rey and Ulrich Liman, gave a public lecture on March 12 at the Aula Magna du Château on the theme of post-carbon neighborhoods. Moderated by Selver Kabacalman, journalist for the daily newspaper "Le Courrier", the evening highlighted the theoretical and operational interest of the neighborhood scale in the face of climate challenges.
Against a backdrop of climate emergency and the prospect of a low-carbon society, it is essential to act simultaneously on multiple dimensions linked to both climate protection and adaptation to the consequences of climate change. The result is the need for far-reaching transformations in the urban environment, notably in terms of building organization, mobility management, construction methods, increasing the number of green spaces, making the most of local resources, and abandoning the use of fossil fuels.
At the interface between the urban vision and the architectural project, the approaches developed at the neighborhood scale allow these criteria to be considered beyond a single building while remaining sufficiently circumscribed to apprehend them tangibly.
In this context, Prof. Emmanuel Rey began by presenting the challenges and potential of the prospective concept of the post-carbon neighborhood, corresponding to the emergence of a third generation of urban operations integrating sustainability issues on a neighborhood scale. Based on analyses of carbon flows in Geneva's Praille- Acacias-Vernets (PAV) sector, Ulrich Liman then presented the LOCUS (acronym for Low Carbon Urban Startegy) methodology, developed within the laboratory as part of the "Maillages fertiles" research project.