AMIENS

SCALES — XL/L/S – Territorial / Urban / Architectural LOCATION — Montières business area POPULATION — City 132,699 inhab. STRATEGIC SITE— 170 ha / PROJECT SITE— 25ha & 32ha SITE PROPOSED BY — City of Amiens and Amiens Métropole

OWNER OF THE SITE — City of Amiens, Amiens Métropole, private owners POST-COMPETITION PHASE — Urban study, urban planning for the strategic site, project for restructurings of public places and architectural realizations

Brigitte FOURÉ — Mayor of Amiens Jean-Christophe LORIC — Deputy mayor in charge of urban planning and housing

1. WHAT ARE THE GOALS OF THE SITE MUTATION? The main goals of the site mutation are the opening to the river and the development of a new link to the landscape, and more specifically to water. The idea is to spread the city centre to the West and reach the former Cosserat factory, which is an exceptional industrial heritage at the heart of the district. Reconquering the fallow lands of this area, which are true real estate opportunities, allows considering combining different functions in this monofunctional district.

2. HOW CAN THE SITE BE INTEGRATED IN THE ISSUES OF PRODUCTIVE CITIES? HOW DO YOU CONSIDER THE PRODUCTIVITY ISSUE? We want to develop new forms of production in order to reinforce the existing activity and allow intensifying the production side of the site. For instance, water, which enabled the development of market gardening and industry, could be reconsidered with regard to current issues —such as food self-sufficiency, short food distribution networks and cycles, energy production... New functions, mostly residential, could progressively be implanted in the area.

3. HAVE YOU ALREADY DEFINED A SPECIFIC PROCESS FOR THE URBAN AND/OR ARCHITECTURAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE SITE AFTER EUROPAN? The three rewarded teams are invited to present their projects to local actors (local representatives, inhabitants, entrepreneurs and owners…) Project promoters are already in and some of them are included in the process and others will soon be. The idea is to define a specific frame for a negotiated urbanism for the sector. This process will be orchestrated by the City of Amiens along with one or several of the three teams. Later, a program of actions will be elaborated in the short, medium and long term.

Cultivating the City, or the Lessons from the Worm AMIENS (FR) — WINNER

AUTHOR(S) — Cléo Borzykowski (FR), Antoine Gabillon (FR), Agnès Jacquin (GE), Adèle Ribuot (FR), Charlotte Rozier (FR), Landscape architects; Laura Castagné (FR), Architect CONTACT — info@carlos-collective.org

PHASE 1: RESTRUCTURING, DE-COMPACTING TEAM POINT OF VIEW — Nowadays the soil is mainly a surface on which the City lies and is no longer considered as an active resource for urban metabolism. The Somme administrative department has been shaped by its geological conditions. Topography, hydrology and soils have influenced regional morphology and development. Based on lessons from the worm, the project aims at bringing the soil back at the core of urban territory. It reconnects social, economic and ecological productivity in order to provide not only electricity and heat, but also calories and knowledge. The project focuses on simple, biologically oriented interventions. It is a regenerative infrastructure using the tools of the worm: perforate, link, diversify, re-scale and infiltrate. The soil project is not a master plan but a long-term process based on experimentation.

JURY POINT OF VIEW — A proposal that is, in terms of strategy and method, rich and innovative on several scales. Based on the principle of soil regeneration, the team’s proposal is doubly relevant ecologically and economically. The proposed concept of development, the “earthworm strategy”, is enriched by the sensitivity of a project that pays attention to nature and the landscape, based on the qualities and resources of the site. It responds to the competition them with a particular radicalness.

The Awakened Banks

AUTHOR(S) — Clémentine Caron (FR), Malik Darmayan (FR), Architects CONTACT — Le28 Architectes, Paris (FR) T. +33 674170163, agence@le28architectes.com www.levingthuit-architectes.com

AMIENS (FR) — RUNNER-UP

TEAM POINT OF VIEW — The aim is to support the city of Amiens in its desire to revitalize its image, its economic and touristic dynamism through the conversion of Montières activity area. Via the implementation of development and attractiveness tools, the goal is to create a new welcoming centrality while preserving the industrial and artisanal identity of Amiens’s history, pushing the psychological limits of downtown. The objective is not to plan a massive transformation by implementing a masterplan but to initiate a smooth urban transition. In order to settle in the site history structural elements, constituting its DNA, will be identified and valued. This backdrop must be accurately inhabited in order to structure a living neighbourhood where activities are located alongside housing and facilities, and around public and shared spaces.

JURY POINT OF VIEW — A successful project that deals precisely with site issues and offers a large-scale perspective. The proposal, with regard to the theme, inserts within the commercial zone a residential area, developing new forms of diversity between activity, housing and new venues. The jury particularly appreciated the proposal’s clarity, which accurately addresses the site issues.

AUTHOR(S) — Alexis Lecaplain (FR), Ondine Boutaud (FR), Anne-Gaëlle Elin (FR), Gaspard Vivien (FR), Architects CONTACT — Quimper (FR) T. +33 680429225, alexis.lecaplain@gmail.com

TEAM POINT OF VIEW — The Sédimontières project offers a town planning strategy through 4 phasing-in periods of the Montière area, all of which dealing with the surroundings development. Both the project’s temporality and spatiality have specifically been designed to accommodate to various uses in a versatile and sustainable city. This evolving structural guide sets out a comprehensive resilient perspective of the city through a gradual project mechanism. Pressure points are the first foundations of the project within the expanded site. These micro-actions operate independently or through a constellation of subjects, as they develop the area in partnership with the Alliance/Immochan and Orion/Step projects. As a geological mechanism processes, 4 steps of varying intensity deal with the territory at one time.