Maintenant Belcier,
Formuler des communs dans la déprise
Picture of the urban collective walk realized at the end of the porject
Analytic start
The subject of my degree focuses on our ability as architects, urban planners, and citizens to reformulate and rethink common use bases in highly programmed territories that are in decline and experiencing a crisis of imagination.
Bordeaux
Bordeaux, a city that became a metropolis in 2015, encompasses 28 municipalities. Numerous urban projects initiated in this area illustrate the former city's ambitions to make Bordeaux "the sleeping beauty," the center of an economically dynamic, touristy, and accessible region. Some projects are the result of this policy, such as the extension of the tram network, the 50,000 housing project, the city's inclusion as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the creation of the Bordeaux-Paris high-speed rail line and Hall 3. There are also five major urban projects underway: Bassins à Flot, Brazza, Bastide-Niel, Floirac, and Euratlantique. These attempts to create life and a city outside of Bordeaux's historic center reflect the desire to become an attractive city on a national level.
Euratlantique
Euratlantique, whose name is reminiscent of Euroméditerranée in Marseille, is a project of national interest launched in 2015 in three municipalities of the metropolitan area, including Bordeaux, Bègles, and Floirac. This project covers 740 hectares and is divided into two ZACs, including
the Garonne Eiffel Rive Droite ZAC and St-Jean Belcier, behind the train station. It combines all the typical features of a ZAC. This urban renewal plan is currently experiencing a palpable political and legal crisis, notably due to conflicts between the developer, the new environmentalist community, and citizens, as well as internal conflicts between the project managers and the client.
Zac St Jean-Belcier
The site of my diploma is that of a ZAC (Common Development Zone) whose goal was to open up the Belcier neighborhood behind the train station and transform it into an economic hub.
This neighborhood has long been despised, forgotten, isolated, and set apart due to its position behind the train station, caught between the influence of the national interest market (Min de Brienne) and the boulevards. It has become associated with a logistics district and disreputable nightclubs, all now closed.
In fact, I had never set foot in Belcier before this diploma. Or perhaps once, when some friends lured me into this 10,000m² nightclub called La Plage.
The Saint-Jean-de-Belcier ZAC is currently experiencing numerous obstacles. The complex situations and tensions created by such an ambitious project are numerous. I could mention the complexity of pre-emption times and plot acquisitions, which make the project much longer. For example, on a block scale, we can find the EPA, individuals, private companies, Bordeaux Métropole, and the city of Bordeaux. I could also mention the political and social tensions, the radical nature of certain thresholds, the dramatic impact of arrivals on the site, the omnipresence of voids, construction sites, cranes, and yet little human presence.
This site, which evokes an image of disarray, abandonment, and inaccessible voids, is nevertheless the foundation for alternative, interstitial, marginal, and occasional uses. This seemingly impassable site, under construction, could, I think, become a ground for experimentation.
This project is therefore an attempt at networking, at partial, temporary activation, between objects selected because they offer potential flexibility in terms of their spatial qualities and relative temporalities of evolution.
Yet, as I wander around, I become attached to it, I project things onto it, I begin to feel comfortable, crossing barriers, passing under gates, and discovering an improbable number of potential spaces to occupy.
Bordeaux, a city that became a metropolis in 2015, encompasses 28 municipalities. Numerous urban projects initiated in this area illustrate the former city's ambitions to make Bordeaux "the sleeping beauty," the center of an economically dynamic, touristy, and accessible region. Some projects are the result of this policy, such as the extension of the tram network, the 50,000 housing project, the city's inclusion as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the creation of the Bordeaux-Paris high-speed rail line and Hall 3. There are also five major urban projects underway: Bassins à Flot, Brazza, Bastide-Niel, Floirac, and Euratlantique. These attempts to create life and a city outside of Bordeaux's historic center reflect the desire to become an attractive city on a national level.
Euratlantique
Euratlantique, whose name is reminiscent of Euroméditerranée in Marseille, is a project of national interest launched in 2015 in three municipalities of the metropolitan area, including Bordeaux, Bègles, and Floirac. This project covers 740 hectares and is divided into two ZACs, including
the Garonne Eiffel Rive Droite ZAC and St-Jean Belcier, behind the train station. It combines all the typical features of a ZAC. This urban renewal plan is currently experiencing a palpable political and legal crisis, notably due to conflicts between the developer, the new environmentalist community, and citizens, as well as internal conflicts between the project managers and the client.
Zac St Jean-Belcier
The site of my diploma is that of a ZAC (Common Development Zone) whose goal was to open up the Belcier neighborhood behind the train station and transform it into an economic hub.
This neighborhood has long been despised, forgotten, isolated, and set apart due to its position behind the train station, caught between the influence of the national interest market (Min de Brienne) and the boulevards. It has become associated with a logistics district and disreputable nightclubs, all now closed.
In fact, I had never set foot in Belcier before this diploma. Or perhaps once, when some friends lured me into this 10,000m² nightclub called La Plage.
The Saint-Jean-de-Belcier ZAC is currently experiencing numerous obstacles. The complex situations and tensions created by such an ambitious project are numerous. I could mention the complexity of pre-emption times and plot acquisitions, which make the project much longer. For example, on a block scale, we can find the EPA, individuals, private companies, Bordeaux Métropole, and the city of Bordeaux. I could also mention the political and social tensions, the radical nature of certain thresholds, the dramatic impact of arrivals on the site, the omnipresence of voids, construction sites, cranes, and yet little human presence.
This site, which evokes an image of disarray, abandonment, and inaccessible voids, is nevertheless the foundation for alternative, interstitial, marginal, and occasional uses. This seemingly impassable site, under construction, could, I think, become a ground for experimentation.
This project is therefore an attempt at networking, at partial, temporary activation, between objects selected because they offer potential flexibility in terms of their spatial qualities and relative temporalities of evolution.
Yet, as I wander around, I become attached to it, I project things onto it, I begin to feel comfortable, crossing barriers, passing under gates, and discovering an improbable number of potential spaces to occupy.
The project
Diagrams of temporalities and differents uses of places
To understand the possibilities for influencing each object, I therefore conducted a survey of spatial, relational, and temporal qualities. In their temporality, all objects present a form of availability due to ongoing or halted construction, legal obstacles, and lengthy pre-emption processes.
The time parameter is an essential vector of this project, allowing me to understand which spaces were available for how long, some with an urgent need for re-examination due to a flexibility of use that is still possible today.
To categorize the project into timescales, I grouped together spaces that would be the basis for rather long-term uses, potentially linking the site's present and future. This timescale concerns land currently owned by the SNCF, with no uses, and threatened with purchase by the EPA. A local opposition committee managed to block the project by launching a citizen vote. The future of the Amédée St-Germain sector could therefore possibly take a different turn and be part of an overall project different from that of the ZAC. Residents are demanding community spaces and sports facilities. If we speculate about a different evolution, why not take advantage of this initial derailment to shift the initially planned project to the left?
Entangled in the long term, a second temporality is that of a shorter time, which concerns spaces threatened with construction in the next 2, 3, 4, or 5 years and which include empty plots, vacant lots sometimes supporting marginal uses. These already used spaces could be shared land to be established through temporary occupation. I am thinking in particular of the spaces located at the site entrances, which truly communicate the current state of the site. Some of these objects have the qualities of squares, and paradoxically, a density of vegetation, rare in these construction zones. Through their communicative factor, these spaces could temporarily, and during the construction period, paint a different picture of the site. By moving from ruin to public space with the addition of light, furniture, micro-programs, or other elements.
The time parameter is an essential vector of this project, allowing me to understand which spaces were available for how long, some with an urgent need for re-examination due to a flexibility of use that is still possible today.
To categorize the project into timescales, I grouped together spaces that would be the basis for rather long-term uses, potentially linking the site's present and future. This timescale concerns land currently owned by the SNCF, with no uses, and threatened with purchase by the EPA. A local opposition committee managed to block the project by launching a citizen vote. The future of the Amédée St-Germain sector could therefore possibly take a different turn and be part of an overall project different from that of the ZAC. Residents are demanding community spaces and sports facilities. If we speculate about a different evolution, why not take advantage of this initial derailment to shift the initially planned project to the left?
Entangled in the long term, a second temporality is that of a shorter time, which concerns spaces threatened with construction in the next 2, 3, 4, or 5 years and which include empty plots, vacant lots sometimes supporting marginal uses. These already used spaces could be shared land to be established through temporary occupation. I am thinking in particular of the spaces located at the site entrances, which truly communicate the current state of the site. Some of these objects have the qualities of squares, and paradoxically, a density of vegetation, rare in these construction zones. Through their communicative factor, these spaces could temporarily, and during the construction period, paint a different picture of the site. By moving from ruin to public space with the addition of light, furniture, micro-programs, or other elements.
Itinerary samples
Itinerary samples
Identifying places that could be used temporarely for the project
So the question is how to seize this fragment of the ZAC (Common Development Zone) to inject pioneering uses. The term pioneering use could describe a set of occupations and programs taking place at the heart of major urban projects that need to be reexamined. Acting like a Trojan horse, pioneering use can be prefigurative and establish itself for a longer period within a space, a territory for which it was not intended.
Haus der statistik, a Berlin project that I was able to experience, was a legal occupation of the ground floor of a former GDR building, throughout its deconstruction and reconstruction phase. Summer schools, a materials library, theater troupes, an exhibition space, a consultation workshop, and a café to follow the progress of the work as well.
These pioneering legal (sometimes illegal) uses can open up debates, negotiations, and other possibilities by formulating a different future for the spatialities concerned. Can we already recognize the qualities of public spaces in ongoing construction sites? On this site, numerous fragments offer themselves to us as opportunities for free experimentation. To question these spaces, it seemed necessary to me to initiate a project-based approach more open to participation and closer to performance and usage simulation. The idea of organizing an exploratory walk across my entire site seemed ideal to me, not so much to certify the necessary presence of certain uses as to highlight the urgent need to re-examine certain spaces on my site.
This site must be exposed to widely feasible urban experiments. We need to initiate a city culture in Bordeaux (as Agora was able to do). A city that could offer renewed visions of the urban.
Haus der statistik, a Berlin project that I was able to experience, was a legal occupation of the ground floor of a former GDR building, throughout its deconstruction and reconstruction phase. Summer schools, a materials library, theater troupes, an exhibition space, a consultation workshop, and a café to follow the progress of the work as well.
These pioneering legal (sometimes illegal) uses can open up debates, negotiations, and other possibilities by formulating a different future for the spatialities concerned. Can we already recognize the qualities of public spaces in ongoing construction sites? On this site, numerous fragments offer themselves to us as opportunities for free experimentation. To question these spaces, it seemed necessary to me to initiate a project-based approach more open to participation and closer to performance and usage simulation. The idea of organizing an exploratory walk across my entire site seemed ideal to me, not so much to certify the necessary presence of certain uses as to highlight the urgent need to re-examine certain spaces on my site.
This site must be exposed to widely feasible urban experiments. We need to initiate a city culture in Bordeaux (as Agora was able to do). A city that could offer renewed visions of the urban.
Uses Temporalities
Listing uses, temporalities to be able to reinvent spaces, their programmation and create a global cohesion between those.
The walk and diferent notes
Scans from the walk participants notebooks + All the pictures on top of this page
I therefore decided to implement a prototype action, a walk.
Once again, this project does not serve so much as an exact response to a given situation, but rather to reveal a number of dysfunctions that deserve special attention and essential questioning. The walk, the simulation of use, and the meeting of a group of individuals can act as a catalyst by being the beginning of a longer process of exchanges, reflections, meetings, and negotiations. It is also a way for me to de-dramatize the site and its overly ambitious challenges by bringing them down to the scale of a tangible and real experience. It was also unexpected to be able to end this final year of the final year of the program against the backdrop of a health crisis with a group experience, at nightfall. This nocturnal experience will firstly allow us to reconnect with a temporality that has been forgotten because it was sacrificed for a certain time. It is also justified by the fact that night is a moment of silence and stillness on this construction site, becoming the image of a total shutdown of the ZAC.
During my first nighttime visit, this site seemed larger, more accessible, and more complete in the sense that presences and uses that were almost nonexistent during the day were amplified or exposed to me. I met François, the site guard, alone in his car, monitoring the train tracks until 4 a.m. I met Karima, forced to prostitute herself on Rue de la Seglière, 50 km from her home, and with whom we had to resolve a problem with her car, insurance, and the impound lot. All these conversations, encounters, exchanges, and experiences are treasures that reinforced the image I had formed of this site. A complex site made up of spatial, social, legal, and political negotiations, reflecting a limitless ambition that is crumbling but needs to be moderately renewed with our own resources.