Nature and Humankind: Regenerative Dialogues

You are cordially invited to attend the first lecture in our Transition Seeds 2025 series, dedicated to the presentation of diploma projects in urban planning, architecture and landscape architecture relating to the ecological transition.

The context of environmental emergency calls into question the framework of public action as much as that of urban and architectural practice. A renewal of design practices has become apparent in recent years. This movement opens up new prospects for reconciling architecture with the various forms of life that inhabit the urban landscape. In this sense, new projects shaped by environmental imperatives are taking form.

Based on the study of two projects, this lecture proposes to explore new methodologies that give genuine space to all the forms of life inhabiting the urban landscape, notably soil and water, in order to bring fresh attention to them. Our approaches now understand soil and water as complex environments that shape the relationship between living beings and humankind. These commitments share a single ambition: to bring disciplines and design methods together in order to renew our approaches to the living world and rethink the bond between Nature and Humankind.

Lectures

Staging movement. From the Veveyse territory to urban theatres

Ada MASSARENTE, architect, EPFL
Scientific and project assistant, Lab-U, EPFL

Movement is not given enough consideration in architectural design. Whether at the scale of a territory or of an urban scene, this project opposes the control of bodies as the only way of relating to movement, and therefore to life, in urban space. Instead, it explores how movement might be staged. The intervention proposes to revitalise a pre-Alpine torrent, the Veveyse, by returning to the water the undeveloped spaces it once occupied. This is achieved by drawing the channels inherent to its morphology, by rebuilding the banks that once created different relationships between water and city, and by opening up the two culverted canals, the Monneresses, so that they can once again serve as urban promenades. The former Veveyse delta thus becomes a park at a territorial scale, capable of supporting different forms of life and of connecting different urban fabrics.

Participatory decontamination and refertilisation of the Vergers de l’Îlot in Fontenay-sous-Bois

Lou GOMEZ, PhD candidate in spatial planning, Lab’URBA, Université Gustave Eiffel

This research takes as its case study a historic orchard in the inner suburbs of Paris, twenty years after the founding of the association that ensures its protection, activities and development, and one year after the orchard was temporarily closed because of soil pollution. This participatory research seeks to reflect on the ecology of polluted urban soils. This involved other ways of decontaminating soil and of thinking about its “ecology”, in order to plan natural and built spaces together around a shared collective awareness. We therefore developed a soil project with residents, scientists and artists, around a common concern, the polluted urban soil of the orchard, by carrying out a pragmatic and shared inquiry at the scale of the neighbourhood and the municipality, and by contributing to decision-making and to scenario-building for polluted urban soil projects.

Appendix: Podcast “Les pieds sous terre”

Discussants

Nicolas TIXIER, professor, ENSA Grenoble
Jennifer Buyck, deputy director, Lab’URBA

Image credits

“Collective sound walk at the Vergers de l’Îlot during Nature in the City Day” @ Ligeon, 2024