Dominique ROUILLARD, Architect, professor at the National School of Architecture of Paris-Malaquais, director of the research unit LIAT. Founding member of the architecture and town planning agency Architecture Action.
Faced with environmental and planetary issues, the speaker called for the establishment of a pragmatic vision, far from the apocalyptic and prophetic utopias of a mankind that is certainly new, but frugal and decreasing. Rouillard noted that while on the one hand land resources are decreasing and the climate is changing, mobility is increasing on the other hand. That is why light vehicles that consume less energy and materials offer great value prospect. Indeed, the challenge of decarbonisation is now to be led in two inseparable directions: the first pays great attention to a resource-saving behaviour; the second undertakes the scientific and industrial development of known and effective technologies with regard to insulation, waste treatment, anaerobic digestion, the production of renewable energy and mobility, of course. Long considered the unsurpassable service to which only the private car was able to respond, daily mobility (particularly door-to-door) appears to be the missing section of the reflection on the urban life of the future. Indeed, the automobile has been a strategic player in urbanisation since the 1950s. Like it, new electric vehicles – light, quiet, agile, and energy efficient – are helping to transform the modern city. Without calling for new infrastructure, they repair connections and invent trajectories in the distended and incongruous city-territory, replace proximity with accessibility and reclassify public spaces, air and noise pollution. Urban life is transforming and the electric car is integrated into buildings, erasing the structural oppositions on which modern city and architecture were founded: new behaviours and new technologies create a large common and shared space.