LYON CONFLUENCE (FRANCE)

François Grether (landscape-architect, France):

The urban project inLyon Confluence in France is complex. The geography and the landscape of the site are extraordinary.  It is situated at the confluence of two rivers, the Saône and the Rhône, to the south of a peninsular that connects with the historic town. In the 19th century, a project by Michel-Antoine Perrache led to the construction of a road and a dike to contain the Rhône. The built-up area covers 150 hectares, with a station with the high-speed train in the north, and will eventually become a very lively neighbourhood with 6000 inhabitants and 6000 jobs. However, the genuinely transformable area relates to about 80 hectares, bounded by a north-south railway, and occupies an extremely strategic location in the Lyon conurbation. The city's strategy is to extend the historic centre with a significant modern development. It is a real challenge to reproduce the qualities of the historic centre in terms of density, overlap of different functions, amenities, institutions and housing, within a multiple programme. The development process is partly based on the quality of the programmes and the density of the buildings, and partly on strong connections with very large open spaces. The area is structured into a green network – branching parkland – and a blue network – aquatic activities of all kinds on the docks, culminating eventually with crossings on the Rhône. The essence of the project is the way that varied construction programmes – public and private – are nested into open spaces of water and greenery.
Work has been in progress with the landscape architect Michel Desvigne since 2000. The green spaces are based on the Saône and on the opposite bank, which rises in a very steep, vegetation-covered slope. We have proposed multiple incursions of water in order to develop harbour activities and different types of river-related aquatic practices. These nautical elements have grown significantly from the original proposal, although many of the themes have still to be discussed with all the stakeholders, associations, investors, municipal departments, etc.
The site has access by rail, motorway, tram and metro, but also experiences the negative impact of these structures, as all these flows operate in a complex way unconnected with the land layout. The first job was to untangle all these infrastructures by creating openings and finding a way to walk from one river to the other, and to move the metro underground. The aim was to achieve the former spatial fluidity of the “Cours de Verdun”. So a very strong connection with the land needed to be restored.
The motorway, which follows the late 18th century great royal road, currently prevents access to the water on the banks of the Rhône. Whilst bridges across the river are very close together in the oldest part of the city, the increasing gaps between crossings as you move away from the centre affect the relations between the city and the other bank. The urban project therefore proposes redistributing the space by moving the motorway, reclaiming the dike and finding a new connection with the Rhône.
In the first phase of development, the northern part is connected to the existing district, so that there is no discontinuity between the current and future fabric. The mayor off Lyon, elected in 2001, quickly espoused the overall plan and in particular the creation of a "Nautical Square" around a navigable dock. This is not simply a marina.  A small section is set aside for yachts, it is also used to teach young people kayaking, for water shows, etc.… It is a public square in its own right, comprising two hectares of water and two hectares of quays, another Lyon city square like Place Bellecourt or Place Carnot.
The mayor requested that the public space be surrounded by a major private programme, a "leisure complex" with shops, cinemas, hotels, restaurants of all kinds, a bowling alley, swimming pool, children's games. However, he wanted to postpone the very heavy and costly infrastructure work (burying the metro, removing the motorway) and achieve fast and visible results. We therefore had to reverse our approach: the things that could be done quickly would leverage the subsequent heavier operations. The first completed projects were the tramline and the refurbishment of the sector's central street, Cours Charlemagne.
We then planned all the public spaces, with the dock, the quays, the park consisting of a system of successive squares, and a system of roads with vegetation, sometimes quays, sometimes streets with wide malls. Water is everywhere, in the gardens with a system of aquatic vegetation, and a large promenade on the bank and on the quay.
The dock and the nautical square are designed to accommodate river flood levels and the need to run under the railway and for quays of different levels. The leisure complex is structured around an internal street, and covers an area of 3 hectares, with 70,000 m2  of buildings. There was a design competition for the dock and the quays, won by the landscape architect Georges Descombes, who models himself closely on the urban projects.

The first sector of housing, offices and activities is also currently under construction. The initial decision was to build dense and relatively large constructions, with very few private green spaces, which are not appropriate in an urban centre, since fewer and fewer children play in the gardens below buildings. A competition was held for three large structures of 75,000 m2. However, in each construction, the chosen developers had to call on teams of at least three architects, especially young teams. In all, 15 architects were chosen, based on the programmatic requirements. They included several Europan winners, such as Tania Concko, MVRDV and Pierre Gautier.
There are precise specifications defining the built, fragmented and open structures on the Saône and the nautical square.
The first project, closest to the park, matches the landscape with colours, materials and advances that meet sustainable development criteria, under the European "Concerto" programme, which is very strict on energy-saving. The buildings use wood heating with insulation systems that are relatively undeveloped in France, in particular dual-flow ventilation. As regards uses, the apartments are flexible and easy to reorganise, and the programmes combine social, unregulated or intermediate housing, and activities, within the same structures.

Also under construction is the Regional Council building designed by Christian de Portzamparc. Another major project in progress is the Musée des Confluences, by Coop Himmelblau, which stands at the tip of the peninsula.

OSLO (NORVEGE), EUROPAN 7 PROJECT

Ellen Hellsten (architect, Oslo, Norway):

The Europan project site that we won in Oslo in Norway is situated in the western outskirts of the city. Apart from industrial zones, there are also areas of detached housing and many open areas containing either green spaces or infrastructure, roads and railways.
The site itself contains a fairly large infrastructure, a multi-lane road. Almost 50,000 people come into this district to work. The public spaces are located near the subway station, which in a sense is where people meet. The rest is essentially a typical industrial zone.
This 70,000 m2 area metres is currently undergoing a transformation. As one of the city's new centres, it benefits from higher levels of public transport development. Our proposal went beyond the boundaries of the initial site. We buried the road intersections situated in the upper part of the green perimeter and took the risk of retaining an international wholesale fruit and vegetable market, with a lease due to run until 2020.  In the two years since the competition, our project has changed. The number of housing units planned increased due to strong demand, and we were able to incorporate more of a mix by demonstrating that it was possible for housing, economic activity and the international market to coexist. Our initial project was essentially about planning, since everything was still uncertain and no one knew whether the burial of the road would go ahead or not. We now know that it will. In addition, the real estate sector wasn't yet booming as it is now. At the time, we proposed an approach with two platforms of varying sizes linked with a very distinctive urban park, which would play an important role in decontaminating the neighbourhood.

This approach was finally approved by the municipality. Other competitions are currently in progress around the site: a big 150,000 square metre shopping centre directly linked to our part and a programme of 250 housing units with shops.

We are currently working on different types of density and typologies and on the viability of the distribution platform and park as a public space. The market produces a lot of waste which spreads to occupy space, so in order to release the necessary land to create green spaces, we had to devise a closed composting system. The gardens are designed like enormous market gardens, as a reference to the fruit market. We analysed the different types of Norwegian fruit trees in order to try to create a public space using native vegetation. Exotic plants will be grown in greenhouses. We outlined two alternative solutions for quite different gardens, combining public and private spaces, which are still under discussion with the developer.
The first solution includes housing and a publicly accessible ground area with a network of streets and the distribution centre. Each apartment has a south facing terrace and the ground-level apartments have small private gardens. They are surrounded by a public garden, with parking in the basement. Inside the complex are a "fruit centre" and a big Oslo vegetarian restaurant.

The other proposal, called "Garden city", has public space around the edges and private space in the centre. These are themed gardens with restricted access, separated by residential structures and public spaces. The basement will house extensive parking spaces. We hope to be able to continue our work to connect the complex with its environment by further public spaces.
As regards the way the city will sell this land to private developers, several possible strategies have been mooted. It could sell the whole plot to developers, or alternatively invest in the development on its own behalf.  But whichever way it goes, the important thing is that the developers and the city should agree on a strong project.

DEBATE: OPEN SPACE, NEW PUBLIC SPACES

Ines Nizic (architect, teacher, Croatia-Austria):
One question that occurs to me is the boundary between public city space and private space. Public space is space that is accessible to anyone who obeys its rules. In Europe, we often define public space as space without no social order, where differences meet.
Today, we see theme parks and shopping centres coexisting in the vicinity of public spaces. Despite their private status, these places are often seen as public spaces, and some people even see shopping centres as the new cathedrals of the 20th century.
The Lyon Confluence project integrates cultural buildings into a nautical public square.
The plan in the Oslo project is for interconnected platforms like islands joined by bridges. The aim is to intensify a local entity, by means of a public interest market, fruit trees, vegetables and fruit.
In modern cities, what conditions must be met for a space to be considered as public? Can we use the term "public space" for those new places of assembly such as stations, airports, shopping centres, which have become very important components of urban planning, but where the commercial element clearly takes priority over public life.
Is the quality of public space finally a matter of how it is used, or can the purpose be imposed by the developer?
These days, there are "streets" in shopping centres from which you can be removed by private security guards. I think that there is no longer any strong distinction between public and private. It seems to me that we can now talk about shared spaces, the common use of spaces. 
The Oslo project allows citizens to see how fruit and vegetables are cultivated and sold.  It is always said that democracy can only work when people have access to information. I think that the exposure of the composting process here is an example of this. Showing people that waste can be recycled, proving it, is a political goal. The role of the urban planner or architect is to provide the tools.  After that, it is for the politicians to decide.

Bernard Reichen (architect, urban planner, France):
Whilst the two projects use different means, they both express faith in open space. In fact, this is the primary development of our time. The vast majority of the population wants to live in such spaces, even if enclosed spaces are accepted in historic areas, usually because things have always been that way. For years, urban fragmentation was seen as a process of decline, a disease of the city. Society has changed, it has ecological aspirations, and it has discovered a value other than the historic value of streets and squares, the value of bringing nature back into the city.
In an excellent article entitled "an end to the illusionist space of the renaissance", the videomaker Bill Viola explains that for five centuries we have lived under the dominance of a type of space created by perspective and therefore based on illusion. Today, we are arriving at other perceptions of space where perspective and composition are replaced by distance and emotion. References to the closed territorial urban design of the Middle Ages and to the mental images of Ancient China are being replaced by references to an open space that is far more conducive to imagination and projection.
In the Lyon project, what gives the open space its identity is the presence of water. This is what could now be called the city's foreground values. Everything that opens onto water offers views, corridors of vision entirely chosen by the population. In the Oslo case, it is the urban design itself, with the platforms and the fragmentation of the park's presence, which constitutes the project's unifying component. By different means, therefore, both projects develop a sort of territorial conception of the landscape in which water and nature are perceived as the re-emergence of a history. In Oslo, the approach is even more poetic, founded as it is on the biodiversity of fruit, since the idea of a national fruit and vegetable market is linked with the recolonisation of an area by the fruit trees and by their diversity. However, the fruit trees will need to be carefully managed, since arboreal husbandry is always complicated.
So it is more the imaginative expression of this new landscape that I find important, whereas the link between private and public, a consequence of fragmentation, is almost secondary, in that this great landscape will find its own forms of management, just as the streets and squares found theirs.
Between the historic city and the modern city, there was the city of the Modern Movement, which saw development and conservation as diametrical opposites. The time when the clean slate was a watchword, was also the time when parks and natural reserves were being invented and historic districts turned into sanctuaries. This modern way of thinking is being blown apart. The aim now is to find a partnership between filled and empty space, between built and natural space, constructed by completely different methods – such as urban agriculture, which is in the process of returning to the cities – with completely new ideas,  So this unity of city and nature is going to apply to a kind of urban design that is currently represented by no more than a handful prototypes.

Ines Nizic:
The Lyon project offers a very impermeable boundary between open public space and more closed spaces in the shopping centre, and involves both public and private landowners. Are we now seeing a difference between the use of these spaces? Do they look different?

François Grether:
Our approach in urban terms is pretty traditional. When there are individuals, managers, landowners, in my sense there is no shared ownership. When you are dealing with a particular developer, it is useful to know who is building, where the plot is, where the boundary is. You get to a point where you have to take responsibility, make things clear, know where the boundary between private and public land is. There is also the question of security, and at Lyon Confluence we worked with the security services, which also contributes to establishing what is public and what isn't.
"Open spaces" are in fact public, parts of nature, i.e. vegetation, water, the sky, the weather that changes and the seasons that pass. This is indeed an extremely powerful demand, which can be linked with a form of anxiety created by a failure to understand the urban phenomenon. The abandonment of the notion of the city boundary found an initial response in the modern movement, but it wasn't entirely satisfactory. The connection with the elements of nature then seemed a way of reassuring ourselves about our connection with the world, individually and collectively.


 
Ines Nizic:
On the site proposed in Berlin for Europan 9, it would seem that the apparently public spaces are in fact managed jointly with private landowners. What is the city of Berlin's strategy on this? And also, how do the inhabitants of Berlin experience these new public spaces?

Berlin representative (Germany):
It seems to me that people no longer separate private and public space. In fact, there is nothing all that new about this. The separation between square and street already existed in the past. There have always been transitional spaces. In addition, you find that shopping centres are privately financed and managed, whilst the access to the street has systems deliberately designed to attract people into the shopping centre.
This shift began in the USA and then spread to Europe. This extension of public into private space is a form of enrichment for the city.


 
Ines Nizic:
The question arises of the influence of the State on the rules that apply in these spaces. Are there stricter rules for acceptable behaviour in these places?

Berlin representative (Germany):
The law must act where private control ends. Also, everything depends on the behaviour of the people who use these places. Public order must be maintained, business must be able to operate.  Otherwise, in extreme cases, the police intervene. In Germany, the authorities can decide whether or not to take charge of security in semi-public places, such as access roads to private spaces.

Ines Nizic:
How do you link the scales of these semi-public spaces with the surrounding spaces? Can a public space be restricted to a certain community of users? And in that case, how do you establish the link between these different types of space?

Ingar Hjelmberg (representative of the city of Oslo):
The Europan project is a big new thing for the city. We talked long and hard about the question of whether people have the right to go into a residential zone and pick an apple from a tree. I would tend to be in favour of a precise separation of ownership. As an owner, one has clearly defined rights and obligations and the risk, if one is not an owner, is that one will not feel concerned and no longer want to be responsible for maintenance. We have not yet made our decision. Moreover, I don't think that the younger generation needs the nature of the property, public or private, to be specified.  They experience the two types of space in modern cities in the same way.  
What can a private individual do in public space if it is accessible? If people have a right to grow plants in a public space, it means that a private activity can increase the value of the space. People often think that the communal areas of big housing blocks are owned by an unspecified external entity, which is not the case with smaller buildings, because people know each other and take more care of this space, although it is also public. The question here is the relationship people have with the building, whether they feel free or not. So the psychological aspect is very important.   Also, you have to take account of different cultures.
I would like to go back to the question of the financing of public spaces. There are often deficits arising out of management problem. In a former industrial zone, you can either speculate on land being given a new identity, or alternatively establish parks to make the site more attractive. But how do you finance the maintenance of these public spaces? How do you use the legacy value of these former rural or industrial spaces by making them more attractive for local people?

Carlos Arroyo Zapatero (architect, Spain):
Both of the proposed projects looked at the question of "improving the brand image" of the site. The aim, in fact, is to create a sense of belonging to these neighbourhoods. In Oslo, the development of the vegetation aspect over a whole life cycle is truly fascinating. It involves producing a new image around the idea of public space.

Ines Nizic:
At Opatija in Croatia, what is the town's view on the built-up and existing spaces and its attitude to the question of green mobilities?

Opatija representative (Croatia):
The first question is how to attract people to spaces that were not previously public, and the second is about ownership and which parts to open up to the public. These different aspects are linked.
As regards ownership, a public-private partnership will settle the question of openness, since the municipality can always guarantee public access. As regards public management, the aim will be to give a new structure to this previously underused space. It will be a challenge for the young architects who respond to the competition.
In Berlin, the city attracts many tourists, which encourages the design of symbolic buildings. Does enhancing public spaces through good architecture bring subsequent returns on the investment?

Berlin representative (Germany):
The effects are not so direct. What happens is very interesting. It is indeed urban qualities that make people want to visit a city, make them like it, want to come back, tell other people about it and so develop tourism. This is also true for the people of Berlin, who go to places where they feel comfortable.
But the question of whether the money invested in regenerating a site can be recovered in order to finance other sites, is a tricky one. This certainly happens in some places, but it is not possible under Germany's tax system. While I agree that the population's views should be listened to, I also think that the city should play a more active role. Public spaces provide lessons on how to manage conflict and therefore on democracy.
How can the authorities change the existing rules to create public space of high quality? What more active role could the city and local authorities play to profit from architecture in the public space?

Donauwörth representative (Germany):
It seems to me that the authorities should work in day-to-day partnership with developers and designers. Simply applying regulations is not enough.  They need to find an avenue for dialogue with the architect to find out where the value you have talked about can be created. Any urban development project necessarily creates value. If a project contributes nothing and the work is simply an end in itself, it goes nowhere.
There needs to be a real partnership between architects, urban planners and political decision-makers. In Germany, when local authorities lack creativity, you can easily see that nothing much happens. And it is clear that when local government wants to develop a district in a city, they need to be open to creative ideas. If they are reluctant or conservative, a district will take time to adapt. The time factor certainly plays a decisive role.
Moreover, it has been said that the public space is also a place of conflict, of confrontation. So when we talk about transforming districts, we need to know what we want to do. When conflicts arise, I think that government should intervene to prevent the emergence of no-go areas. So cities need to anticipate the kinds of problems that can arise, given that there is no such thing as a city without conflict.