The Vivifica project, which means "bringing back to life", proposes to capitalize on the singular geography and the rich history of the site. Through four themes, we develop the subject of the living city: the Living City as an inhabited city , the Living City in the biological sense of 'living' and nature, the Living city as a place of effervescence of living together, the Living city, the city cycle.
By stitching the urban fabric, the project restores an overall coherence to the district.
Local
France
Limoges
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
As an individual in partnership with other persons
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A living city is first and foremost an inhabited city, with all the riches and constraints that this project entails. Furthermore, we cannot talk about the city of today and tomorrow without mentioning the impact of the health crisis and what it has revealed about our urban environment. This crisis is above all a housing crisis, with all the problems that the city concentrates: rising land prices, pollution, nuisances due to poorly managed urban overcrowding, little or no relationship with nature and the great landscape, etc. These are all obstacles to the societal project of living together that the city represents.
The deterioration in the quality of new housing built in major cities over the last twenty years does not encourage the reversal of this trend. The lack of generosity and innovation in terms of housing, outdoor spaces, daily domestic functionality and individual privacy are all issues that put an urban exodus back on the agenda. So how can life in Limoges city centre be made desirable for a family, a young couple, an elderly person or a student?
LIVING CITY
CARE
living ecosystem
frugality
cycles
Limoges has the image of a green city, with 30% of its territory composed of agricultural and natural areas. But what is really happening in the city centre?
Apart from the river banks of la Vienne, the presence of nature is gradually disappearing from the public domain and becoming confidential. The majority of green spaces are confined to the private domain (gardens of individual houses, residential parks, etc.). Apart from a few emblematic public spaces , which are of high quality, there are few spaces accessible to all.
The question of the soil as a living ecosystem appeared to us to be central to the place of plants in the project. The very high proportion of waterproofed and/or degraded spaces caused by industrial activities and the earthworks they have generated was a concern.
We propose several vegetation strategies, contextualising these approaches as closely as possible to the specific characteristics of the site. The renaturation of part of these soils is a real challenge for the quality of life within the district by remedying the heat island phenomenon. Our project proposes to reintegrate this question of permeability by working with the existing public spaces. We have imagined strategies for reclaiming the land at a lower cost, which favour local ecotypes in the form of «reclaiming gardens» and the creation of planted pits. The recycling of existing soils is part of a reflection on the economy of means to limit the waste generated by our interventions.
On former industrial sites, the question arises as to the resilience of the soil in the face of the pollution generated by these activities and its capacity
to accommodate living organisms once again. The costs of cleaning up the land can hinder the emergence of renewal projects. Our approach favours long-term phytoremediation strategies with transitional occupations. In the long term, these strategies aim to reappropriate these sites within the neighbourhood by creating a virtuous ecosystem.
The Saint-Martial «district» where the project is developed is fortunate in that it already offers this residential quality with suburban sectors that have been built in the hollows of the large historical complexes. This form of housing, although individually qualitative, does little to create the desire to live together that constitutes the essence of urban quality of life. Moreover, a large part of the housing offer, resulting from the suburban fabric, does not correspond to the criteria of contemporary housing as it is often the case in the old centres: dilapidated and lacking in luminosity of the dwellings, absence of outside spaces, etc.
The project intend to recreate uses that are consistent with the domestic scale and peaceful atmosphere that characterise the neighbourhood. We have imagined typologies that preserve the qualities of the individual housing already present on the site by inserting them into a public space project via the neighbourhood facilities. This first scale of intervention allows us to ensure continuity for the inhabitants within the neighbourhood while renewing the offer.
Since Antiquity, the site has been able to live and renew itself, and to accompany the changes in the city of Limoges: housing, combining crafts and industry, civil, military and religious facilities have successively animated the life of this district. It is a site in constant regeneration as the analysis of its parcel history has revealed. However, this dynamic of renewal seems today to be frozen, on hold.
Is this due to a lack of an overall vision for the site?
To a lack of suitable operational tools?
Or is it because of a lack of resources to support this renewal?
We addressed these questions in our Vivifica project by questioning the regeneration cycle of the contemporary city. Our approach to this fragile neighborhood was based on two notions that guided our reflections: frugality and humility. The idea of process has guided the project. It is not defined solely by its formalization, but rather by the actions it sets in motion, sometimes on a very small scale and always with a view to phasing in time.
As is often the case, the site already has the qualities and levers to instill a new dynamic.
Our approach takes advantage of the proximity of larger-scale existing structuring facilities such as the university or the city centre facilities to develop a supply of small housing units for students, the elderly or the frail. This affordable housing is accompanied by a pooling of services, which facilitates community life by increasing the number of shared spaces.
The question of the process and the relationship with the project actors is one of the key elements of our project.
From the outset, we have sought to develop a project that can be adapted spatially and temporally and whose general strategy can be adapted to the constraints (particularly budgetary) of the actors in this process. We have relied on the development of new uses, with little investment and transitional urban planning strategies that allow us to prefigure new public spaces, modifying the perception of the site in the collective imagination and accompanying a more in-depth transformation in parallel.
This modular and malleable design mode allows to include from the design to the finalization of the project all the actors of the city: from the inhabitants to the institutional actors .
For this project and within the framework of the europan competition, we worked on a global reflection on the scale of the European competition on the theme of the living city. The declension of this theme at all scales of projects and through all the sites spread on a European scale allowed us to explore multiple dimensions of the living city. Our project is part of this global reflection by questioning this notion in the context of an average city and a fragile district struggling to reinvent itself.
We conceived this project as a meeting not between disciplines but between transversal and complementary visions. Our professional backgrounds are very varied and we wanted to emphasize this multidisciplinarity in our project. The project therefore reflects common questions and commitments: working with what is already there, paying particular attention to the project process and not only to its formalization, enriching the project by working at different scales from the territory to the habitat.
The urban question is often treated on a large scale and struggles to take into account the subtleties of the territories.
It was fundamental for us to get away from the linear logic of traditional urban projects. The operational tools developed by the project are devices that allow us to adapt to the land and financial opportunities made available by the city of Limoges. Close consultation with all the project's stakeholders and the city will make it possible to define the levers and operational starting points for the urban revitalization of the district.
Our project strategy is based on operational tools, customizable, which can be mobilized according to the property, financial and temporal opportunities of the city of Limoges.
The project offers a toolbox for phased revitalization, which can be modulated and adapted to the city's funding and opportunities or to other projects. It illustrates the activation of these tools in several "pilot" sectors, which have emerged as the levers for the transformation of the district.
The idea of process, which encompasses the notions of reopening, renaturation and recreation of links, guides a project which is not defined solely by its formalisation, but rather by the actions it sets in motion, sometimes on a very small scale.
This logic of frugal urbanism, which is becoming an imponderable of urban development in the current context, draws a project that can be modulated according to the needs of the sector.
It is through this strategy that we will be able to put into action a resuscitation of the site.
This design of a non-linear and rigid project, but an adaptable and incremental one, allows the project to be thought of in an inclusive manner. This toolbox strategy allows for a transposable approach through the mobilization of major themes such as the reclamation of the land in three dimensions and the place of vegetation, the quality of public spaces and the notion of shared spaces, the invention of new habitat typologies, etc.
The city of limoges and the saint martial district reflect fragile urban situations whose problems are easily transposable to other places and other countries. How to do with little is becoming an unavoidable question at all levels of the project process.
The project therefore reflects particularly contemporary questions and commitments: working with what is already there, paying particular attention to the project process and not only to its formalization, enriching the project by working at different scales from the territory to the habitat.
