Festival dell'architettura

The international consultation “Le Grand Paris” is a project launched by former french president, Nicolas Sarkozy, with the objective of starting a debate on how to organize a small capital of just over 2 million inhabitants surrounded by suburbs of 9 million people. Ten international and multidisciplinary groups have worked between June 2008 and November 2009. Today these 10 teams are grouped into a permanent structure, the '' Atelier International du Grand Paris ", which has the mission to go on with the thinking, to facilitate cooperation between players in the metropolis and to promote public debate. In the reports submitted at the end of the consultation by the different teams the issue of density is recurrent.

As noted by Marc Weil (Weil, 2010, 119), density is above all a legal term that refers directly to the urbanization. In a certain way, density means city. To deal with the problems of Paris large suburbs many projects propose to urbanize and then to densify these areas. For example, the team Descartes (Yves Lyon) studies how to change regulations to allow expansions on small plots in the "pavillonnaire" zones, of single-family homes, and proposes to requalify public space.

Portzamparc states that "sustainable" is the "convertible" and, than, suggests new rules against “blocked” territories, works on the parcels of the seventies "grands ensembles"’s buildings and reduces them by dividing them. The convertibility also means, for the architect, an increase in thickness of the apartment blocks. An example is given by one of his works of restructuring, in rue Nationale in Paris (1990-1995), a project carried out as part of the rehabilitation of a large block in the city’s thirteenth district . A block building was renovated by increasing the width of the apartments. The added thickness improves thermal insulation and makes possible adding balconies and loggias to the apartments. However, redrawing the façade implies to change the limit and the profile of the road. The choice of density brings us back to the problematic of public space: it is the quality of public space that helps to accept urban densification.

A characteristic architectural element to the high density of the city is the tower building. In the various team reports, towers houses are often proposed as a perimeter zone of public green (Roland Castro, Jean Nouvel, Portzamparc).

The urban park as a justification for the construction of tower houses and for densification ? Sébastien Marot, member of the Scientific Council for the consultation of "Le Grand Paris", says : “That’s the “syndrome of Central Park”.”

In the debate of the post-Kyoto mobility plays an important role since one of the objectives adopted is to minimize greenhouse gases emissions. In this sense, one could expect a decreased in mobility in Paris metropolis. Instead it’s the opposite that is proposed. It is precisely mobility that makes possible to structure the territory and to establish a hierarchy between spaces on a territorial scale and those on a local scale. Mobility is a guarantee for the proper functioning of the metropolis. Thanks to the improvement of the transport network unifying the territory is not only an economic but also a social goal. What is near in the city, says Jean Nouvel, is what is quickly and easily accessible from the place where you are. Therefore the hierarchy of places is not of spatial but rather of time order. One of the main parameters for the evaluation of the territories is the reduction of the duration of travels made possible by speed increase. The proposed mobility systems are diverse: from micro-mobility to macro-mobility through intermediate mobility.

Urbanization as a factor of mobility. In this sense Grambach proposes to set in motion the territory and transforms the motorway Paris-Le Havre in an avenue while Portzamparc plans an elevated platform over the ring road of Paris (the “peripherique”) for a light urban rail. In this case we may also speak of density in terms of transport.

In all these project considerations the challenge is to make compatible competitiveness and social cohesion : to increase the international competitiveness of the metropolis preserving well-being and improving the everyday lives of the “franciliens” (the inhabitants of  “Ile de France”). Portzamparc qualifies this situation as "urban paradox": how to reconcile "spatially" competitiveness and well-being ?

To overcome this contradiction most project teams develop multi-scale approaches. Social cohesion is not treated only in terms of accessibility of workplaces or entertainment sites but also as proximity.

The real new contribution of these studies is the awareness that, starting from the small scale, metropolis can be changed. Looking at the example of the AUC (Djamel Klouche) team report, it is particularly revealing that, in the final production, near the plants at territorial scale there were apartment models studied at small scale. The architectural project starts from private space and invests the public one, going from the thinking on the one-family house and the different ways of life to the thinking on the territory.

This method of study, that allows you to go from the scale of everyday life to the scale of the territory, and vice versa, is one of the most innovative aspects that have been highlighted by all these works.

All teams have recognized the fundamental character of mobility as well as the need to make it compatible with the quality of life.

The solution to the equation density / mobility will depend on the value of the unknown that is determined today by the project at the scale of everyday life and by the quality of life provided to citizens.

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