Many of Europan’s urban sites are located in the suburbs, a product of functionalist urban planning, which divides up uses into territorial portions, combined with a certain laxity on the morphological front. Some of the young Europan generation accept this legacy in the conviction that their role is to work in a new way within these spaces. Through a close reading of the existing fabric, their goal is to reinterpret it in order to bring out the potential for change and transformation.

- l’AUC architectes urbanistes
- Plattformberlin
- SMAQ Architecture, Urbanism, Research
- TOA architectes
- MTM arquitectos / Xpiral arquitectura
- Why Art Projects - SeARCH

DESIGN THE CITY WITH INFRASTRUCTURE

(extracts from Didier Rebois’ article)

The size of cities all around the world is constantly on the rise, and the compact and stable city has been replaced by a sprawling urban structure, a city region. City dwellers are travelling further and further and their living patterns alternate between speed over large distances – motorways, orbital roads, tunnels – and slower forms of travel in local areas – residential districts, shopping malls, public amenities, leisure parks, etc. To adapt to and feel a part of this nebulous city, they prefer to travel by car when possible, and only use public transport when there is no alternative.
The combination of city sprawl, human densification and speed creates profound transformations in metropolitan space.

Continuities and/or insularities

More and more young professionals have decided to take do what it takes to increase their impact on urban morphology, not only on built structures but also on the status and form of open spaces. However, the way they choose to modify the metropolitan territory can vary depending on their interpretation of the future of the mobile suburban city.
For Jens Metz, winner of Europan 6 in Marseille, the challenge is to create places by first defining the default spaces left by the distribution of the built fabric. So in any given situation, he chooses to start with the empty spaces, to give them boundaries and value as public space and landscape. At the same time, however, he creates connections between them at different scales. In his winning project, urban blocks near la Joliette harbour are restructured around a large, city-scale park, which links the adjacent neighbourhoods together. However, in making these blocks porous through a series of passages between the buildings, he generates a network of multiple pedestrian routes, paralleling the streets and connecting the port, the programmatic strips and the park.
The members of the LAUC agency look at the existing fabric in a very different way. They think that it is futile to try to control a fast changing territory as a whole. Starting from this assumption, they work on what they call the territorial framework, from the local to the global, focusing the active elements of the plan on its most strategic sections, which they see as specific polarities. The title of their winning project in Villetaneuse for Europan 6 – "the antipotemkin city" –clearly expresses their rejection of the idea of managing urban continuity, in favour of focusing points of intensity around a reserved-track tramway site, and developing them at micro scales by exploiting the potential of what is already there.

Mobilities, a new architectural medium

The alliance of the two agencies MTM + XSPIRAL, which won with their joint submission for Europan 6 at Baracaldo, arises from their shared attitude to the relationship between ground and buildings. They produce an architecture of continuous motion around urban flows. The ground of the city is no longer seen as a static space on which the inhabitants move around, but as an infrastructural architecture that supports mobilities. In their winning project, they employ an architecture of folds to devise a sort of dynamic low-level city where the most urban functions are located, and out of which emerges a high-level city of dense buildings. A continuous network of routes through the buildings form platforms, rooftop pedestrian ways, small hills.
With the same idea of creating a landscape that encompasses infrastructures, the SMAQ agency has developed an even more radical vision, where the suburban town is metamorphosed into a continuous landscape, encompassing the area's sparse objects. They start with the urban trajectories of town dwellers in a given context, and use their dynamic patterns of movement at different speeds to design their spaces. Out of this, they generate intersections that are incorporated into a dense programme to create focal points of intensity. In their runner-up project in Bergen for Europan 7, they design a platform that bridges the suburban motorway and houses a mixed urban programme. They link it to the environment by following the routes people take between the adjacent structures, connecting motorised and nonmotorised forms of movement.

The street on what terms?

This problem is a primary focus for the agency SeARCH, a winner of Europan 2. Their construction, a linear residential building in a fairly narrow street in the town of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, has a rooftop car park accessed by a special lift. The streets of the town are no longer invaded by cars, although residents can park outside. One of their more recent projects, a residential complex combining individual and collective housing, reaches a different solution for the same problem. The whole site is closed to cars, but here the car park is underground, under the two dense apartment buildings. A pedestrian street has been created between the buildings, which provides access to the apartments via open galleries, but also illuminates the car park by means of wells of light with trees planted in them.
The French firm TOA, a winner in the Europan 3 competition in Mulhouse in France, has followed directly on from its competition project by specialising in reinforcing the identity of suburban neighbourhoods, whilst articulating new development with the existing fabric. In Strasbourg, for example, as part of a very deliberate municipal policy to promote the use of transport methods other than the car within the city, they needed to design an extension to the ENSAIS (Architecture School) along the tram route. They have taken advantage of the creation of a new building – the school's media library – along the urban facade, to establish a new student bicycle park on the roof. Rather than concealing the cycle park, they give it a distinctive expression along the street front, by surrounding it with a mesh of metal and highlighting the access ramp next to the building's main entrance. What can be done about the fact that certain forms of transport are incompatible within a shared space, without separating them radically or favouring one over the other? This was the crucial question that faced Vicente Guallart, winner of Europan 2 in Spain, who has pursued his investigations into the city in motion through many ambitious urban projects. For him, the magic word is sharing. The street by definition is a shareable space. So in order to solve a very difficult equation in the southern town of Vinaroz, which is full of tourists in summer and quieter in winter, he proposed an approach where the main seaside access route to the town is adjusted to its seasonal patterns of use. In summer, at the height of the season, the street is closed to car traffic so that tourists and residents can enjoy the seafront and the seaside restaurants, with parking solutions being available nearby. In winter, when the town returns to a quieter rhythm, the boulevard is open to car traffic, though care is taken not to interfere with urban life.