The City We Want

In the project "Our Inhabited Space", a team from the Chôros Laboratory (Jacques Lévy, André Ourednik, Mathis Stock) has developed a formal, realistic model that takes as its initial conditions an urban network that is similar to typical networks in contemporary Switzerland.

The model is based on the hypothesis that individual actors create their urban space, clearly respecting various constraints that weigh in their decisionmaking, but also mobilizing and putting in place their concept of the ideal city. The opposition between allophilia (accepting to cohabit with a group that is not one's own) and allophobia (refusing to live within a group that is different) turns out to be highly predictive, so much so that it trumps urban public policy efforts.