Concours rendu septembre 2009

City and attraction: Collective self-sufficiency

Since the creation of cities 5 500 years ago, 2007 is the moment which accomodates, for the first time, 50% of the world’s population. The city attracts always more and more people to it. Why this attraction? Is the connected self-sufficiency aming people to migration towards cities?

City is a human and urbanised self entity. It is self sufficient in many fields: it’s an adminitrative/ political/ religious/ intellectual/ industrial/ trading center. Living in the city is being sure to find an answer to its own needs, desires and hopes. Nevertheless the city means as well shanty town, precariousness, unemployement and insecurity. But, according to the increasing number of city dwellers, we can believe that the city has more appeals than repulsive sides. Maybe this is as a «plural-qualities» place and as a projection of freedom that city becomes appealing. The city offers a possibility; it allows us to figure transformation or a permanent evolution - as a benefit for all.

Stillness doesn’t exists in the city; movement creates its existence. The city is movement. It is the incarnation of the turbulent life of men. It is the place where everything happens, everything change and where everything get transformed. It is an entity of life, the connection to nature. The city has in itself, in a symbolic way, everything which affirm its autonomy, its subsistence and its survival. It is a binder that must fulfill the needs of all but which can be beyond this first need, and be the place where explode the desires and the fantasies of the collective imagination.

City and contraction: Spatial and Energetic self-sufficency

Paris 2057. The ressources of the planet in fossile energies are significantly reduced. The oil is a rare produce et very expensive. It becomes a necessity to do a drastic thrift on the energy spending. The car used to allow displacements not done with the aim of optimisation of the distances between the differents needs of the human life. Those moving, consumers of distance and energy between home, work, resupplying and hobbies etc. are not possible anymore.

In 2057, Paris optimizes its distances. The city gets contracted as a entropic necessity, and get relocalized. It can not increase anymore and can not be propagated on the territory in a uncoordinated and «energy-eater» way.

Paris gives itself new boundaries to its expansion. It must be enough in a space designed by itself and that can not be reached out. It is a vital limit which protect the city from itself in order to assure a intern optimal functioning. A virtual fence impermeable to have a better control of the exchange between the inside and the outside. This controlled porosity redefines its in and out access points.

City and multi-optimization: functional self-sufficiency

The city gets optimized, and for that it becomes re-organised and structured itself homogeneously and specialized.

In the XIXe century, Hausmann had the same aim for Paris to develop an optimized and functional city thanks to the means of the period. A city where the flows were reorganized and fluidified: boulevards, subway, tramway, stations and railways, etc. and a cut up, splitted city in different entities through the districts.

2057 sees the same XIXe principles put in place but at a much bigger scale. All those spred fragments of city of the XXe century are linked to each others. None of this part is isolated, but they must be able to function in a independant way. The proximity, the premise place are essential elements to the city of the XXIe century. The Parisian must be able to live totally at his neighbourhood scale: work, sleep, entertainment, to minimized his displacements. The State decentralizes at this neighbourhood scale: political/ adminidtrative/ educative/ cultural, etc.

City and Specialization: local self-sufficiency

The general consciousness of the economy of all means allowing to the men commmunity to live in optimal and sustainable conditions has taken place through all the scale of the city - settlement included. Everything aim to organize itself homogeneously but distinctively for providing the needs of all. The XXI being over-informing, the displacements decrease and the dwelling get professional. We live and work in the same building. The dwellers can share their means of production - and so, entire buildings get specialized in professional corps and then entire streets. We rediscover the benefit of walking: the streets are reconceived according the idea of promenade.

Finding the right proportion again in each thing is the most important dogma in 2057. By necessity and because of the pauperization, the period is not to spend the money immoderately anymore. The self-sufficiency finds its existence in a certain way, in the accuracy and the balance of the means and the needs.

The buildings make think of the spatial vessels we could imagine at the end of the XXe century. Those ones are full of sensors permitting a continuous control and a real-time regulation of the building life. The city gathers informations of all the buildings which are inter-connected. It is a technic-logistic organ which affirms the good fonctioning of all the parts. Each building with the 2057 norms produces its own energy. But it is the city which is responsible of the energetic globality produced and which is in charge to redistribute where it could fail in the aim of the contractual self-sufficiency of all.