Reasons for a theme

In its 17th session, the Europan competition is continuing the theme from the previous session, Living Cities. Would you explain this choice and perhaps tell us what, in your view, a Living City is?

Alain Maugard: You’re right, it’s important to say why we thought it was the right thing to keep the theme of Living Cities for two sessions. The first thing to say to the candidates is that Europan is focused on the Living Cities theme because we think that it is currently very salient. To put it very simply, we thought of the Living Cities theme before Covid happened, and it turned out that right in the middle of the 16th session, before the results, we had the pandemic and the lockdowns. It illustrated the relevance of the Living Cities theme. At that moment, a particular kind of living entity, the virus, forced us to change our ways of life and our relationship to city living. Cities kept the same morphology, but their metabolism changed. That is the very definition of the idea that “I can live in the same city but use it in a different way”. People find different ways of doing things, a different organisation. It is a real-life demonstration of the notion of metabolism.

It is an integral part of the work of architects and urbanists. Finding different ways of living in time of crisis or of adapting to new societal challenges. Metabolism does not replace morphology, but complements it.

We now have examples of extended café terraces or cycle tracks created during the lockdowns. Many are still there. We lived in a different way and realised, when the pandemic retreated, that it is ultimately a more pleasant way to live.

Metabolism is also about changing the existing building stock. To speak in numerical terms, in the housing sector where the new build stream accounts for less than one percent of the total stock, the existing fabric needs to be changed in order to provide quality of life. In France, a 20-year-old lives in a space averaging twenty square metres. At the age of 60, the same person occupies sixty square metres. Frankly, that makes no sense. Is it really necessary to build something extra in order to find 30 well-made square metres for the older person to live in? Or can we get there by organising the existing stock in a different way? There are many scenarios that can be devised to achieve that. These questions also arise at the urban design level, where the city is also dominated by the existing fabric.

AM Of course, and the pandemic also made us aware of the absence or insufficiency of nature in the city. When you can only travel short distances, the lack of access to nature close by becomes intolerable. We can’t go on without nature in the city, it needs to be present in a big way. The new emphasis on this is now driving architecture and urban design. It is not a fashion, it is a reality that we have become aware in the wake of a health crisis that expanded our horizons. So I am a strong advocate of these two ideas: metabolism and the abundance of nature in the city. This means that we can’t think about urban intensity if greenery and biodiversity are not a part of it, at the centre of it. Events prompted us to continue exploring this theme, and there is plenty left to explore.

So there is a continuity in these two sessions of Europan? In a way, they mutually reinforce each other?

AM That continuity goes much further back, it is part of the DNA of Europan which, with its scientific council, has been developing the session themes in a linked sequence for more than 30 years. This is very clear with the series that ran from Adaptable Cities to Productive Cities, and now to Living Cities.

Adaptable cities (E12, E13) was the key moment in the process: a focus on metabolism and on flexibility rather than the design of rigid projects produced without reference to time and context. Productive Cities (E14, E15) came after that. This theme was based on the observation that cities no longer enjoyed autonomy in vital areas such as food, materials, water, etc. The living world generally achieves global autonomy within its environment. It is self-maintaining and self-organising over time. So when we look properly, the contribution of the living world is consistent with this idea of productive impetus.

Is it not possible, however, to identify a common approach… a specificity of the Europan competition?

AM Europan is about innovation, but innovation through projects that are implemented and are in some way experimental. It is not a theoretical argument about the city, let alone a set of instructions. It could be described as experimental creativity, action-research. That is the big difference compared with other theoretical approaches. Europan asks: how should we act? What should we do? What should we try?

Here, the comparison with the living world is quite interesting. There are mutations in the living world that can be compared with these urban experiments. It’s the Darwinian idea, not in the competitive sense of “survival of the fittest”, but in the sense of trying things that will be adapted to the environment, and others that will be less well adapted. It means that Europan is an accelerator of mutations. For myself, I argue that Europan, for the living city, is Darwin on speed… Obviously, that’s a metaphor.

Isn’t time an important factor for this? It takes time for a neighbourhood to evolve, for users to take ownership…?

AM That is true. But you can see in the teams’ submissions that projects now increasingly develop in phases. You start with an initial operation. You see if it works. If it works, you keep going. If it doesn’t work, you change tack. The possibility of error is incorporated into the project itself.

And this is precisely the approach that local authorities need! We tell them: it’s not as risky as it seems, since it’s gradual. You have told us what you want, there is a project, but the way of proceeding allows space and time for adjustment. And this makes room for what has been called transitional or tactical urbanism… a way of stimulating mutations in time and in space. It’s an exploration of the idea that the urban is is not just the three dimensions of space, but also a question of time.

For a long time, phasing was just about building the first third of the plot, then the second third, and finally the third third. However, it’s better to initiate a process of urban change without immediately focusing on the target of final transformation. The first phase may just involve planting trees, adjusting the street furniture to alter the image of the neighbourhood. And from this, maybe the real estate values go up. Once you get real estate value, you can start work on different types of buildings…

AM In general, Europan gets the difficult questions, on sites that have no clear urban direction, because if it were a typical place with a known programme and standard procedures… there would be no need for a competition like Europan. If the municipality doesn’t have too many preconceived ideas, it will be open to highly innovative proposals that challenge conventional wisdom. It is the only competition where people can win by saying that the question was wrong, or asked in the wrong way, and here is my answer to a better question.

In Europan 16, there was a general trend for the teams to expand the study site, to look for areas beyond the red boundary, in order to clarify their intentions on the project site. The candidates rediscovered the living forces of the city, anchored in its territory, with roots – so to speak – that extend further. To the teams in Europan 17, we say use all the layers of history, the brief should also be enriched by the living world.

In order to understand this expansion of the field of design, I consider the idea of a system very important, i.e. the need for a global vision. The teams are not being asked to solve a partial problem – even if the brief seems narrow – they must immerse themselves in the brief, in wider spaces. They need to manage the effects of interrelations. For example, if – as we will see – the brief is to convert a former hospital, that will create a shockwave across the neighbourhood, and then across the city. This shockwave has to be considered in full, and if necessary localised interventions will be required in this altered ecosystem.

The design process can also be broadened through interdisciplinarity. And here, something has emerged that seems to me very important, the trio of architect, urbanist, and landscape architect. This is no longer about three separate disciplines, where each expert is restricted to their specialty. They need to form a system. There needs to be an osmosis between these disciplines, a permeability. Of course, other disciplines are equally welcome to bring their vision to the Living Cities theme, for example ecology, natural and social sciences…

What we say to the E17 candidates is don’t limit yourself to a single question. We want you to find a balanced solution for the territory.

Doesn’t this lead to responses that are increasingly general, increasingly broad?

AM No, that’s not at all what it’s about. You have to have the idea of complementarity and architectural spatialisation. You can’t cover everything in a competition, with its short deadlines and its three-board submission. But that does not preclude a global view. It is interesting to see projects that have an ecosystemic vision but approach it from an angle that might be complementary with other projects.

And then that makes sense in terms of the three projects selected for the competition follow-on. The jury is also interested in complementarity. For example, the three Quimper teams agreed to work together after the competition at the prompting of the local authority.

Moreover, this capacity to make something that the candidates are expected to demonstrate cannot just be limited to urbanism or generic metabolism. The teams are also expected to produce a subject of architecture. It is important to remember the theme’s subtitle, which asks the candidates to reimagine architectures and to think about the environments people inhabit. Architecture here is understood in a broad sense, not just in terms of new buildings, but also aspects like outdoor spaces, street furniture, changes to the built fabric…

Interview conducted by Ruben Madar and Louis Vitalis