INTERSTICE & REUSE

My project is taking place in the urban context of a post-industrial French city where the past and the future are opposed. Through the renovation and expansion of an educational equipment, I come to question the manufactory of our cities by reinventing its tools.

While current achievements struggle to find a spatial and functional coherence within the city urban planning, the question of the scale of the project becomes paramount. It is time to propose a different approach of making of the city. Where the necessary funds are difficult to raise and the transformation is slow, the interstitial spaces, these residual plots or neglected by the urban development, become a land opportunity for the emergence of new activities and a way to resolve malfunctions of the urban fabric. But beyond space, my project focuses on the existing context and puts in place a cooperative approach with the actors of the territory, starting with its educational partner called ITEP, a specialized Insitute for young with behavior troubles.\nThanks to the entrance to the Lyon Metropolis area, the municipality benefits from aids for its development, starting with the historic city center and the confluence of Gier and Rhone. In the midst of new constructions, industrial and railway wastelands recall the workers’ past in the city. In Givors everything happens at the same time, the past and the future. While the public finance have been getting cleaner for a few years now, the Givors population remains financially one of the most modest in the department. The rising numbers of unemployed people and the dropped out school youngs reveal a social crisis in the middle classes despite careful public service and solidarity historically present on the territory. \nDoing architecture and urban planning with less and thinking about its sustainability are the main objectives of the project. This more frugal approach in means, requires rethinking the way we conceive and expresses itself here through the integration of circularity and reuse as a method and tool of the project. Both contextual and manifest, «Interstice and reuse: new tools to build the city» applies to reveal the potential of this new urban form and the viability of a project based on the economy of resources and the implementation common knowledge.