Urban territories in transition

The revision of the Federal law on territorial planning, accepted by the Swiss people in March 2013, entered into force in May 2014. It aims notably at development within urban areas to better preserve landscapes, arable land and natural environments. These framework conditions curb the pursuit of urban sprawl and therefore encourage the regeneration of urban areas that have already been built.

In this context, most of the projects are part of a certain intensification of land use within already urbanized perimeters. This generates new opportunities, especially in terms of regenerating urban brownfields or transforming existing buildings. But this represents a great challenge for the architectural project, which must simultaneously reconcile a certain density with issues of expressive identity, ecological transition and quality of life.

At the joint between architecture and urban planning, the neighborhood scale offers the advantage of being broad enough to address criteria that go beyond the scale of the building alone – linked, for example, to issues of diversity or mobility – but still sufficiently circumscribed to be able to experiment with concrete actions and aim for tangible results in terms of sustainability. The notion of "neighborhoods in transition" is one of the research axis of the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST).