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 Cities and mobilities  In town, everything moves but not necessarily in the right direction. Tati made a joke of it in his time, in films which satirised 1960s modernity. Today, speed has taken over our lives, turning our approach to the city upside-down. Yet why should our loci of movement not instead be civic spaces, places that promote ease of being? The Mondial, held in September 2002 at Porte de Versailles, is where the public comes to fantasise about engine performance and new concept cars. The Institut pour la ville en mouvement has chosen this stage to draw attention to the vital issue of the quality of city life. Say no to no go spaces! Although linked to issues of sustainable development, the argument is about civic rather than ecological values. Public space should be both aesthetic and practical, for the pedestrian and cyclist as much as for the motorist. This has become a societal challenge. It is the creative dimension of the city on the move that the “Architecture on the move!” exhibition wishes to demonstrate. In our contemporary cities with their plethora of speeds, the pedestrian is too often denied entry, refused access. In day-to-day life, the user of the city is mistreated. The things that are supposed to protect (roundabouts, sound shields and other “antiurban” devices …) are actually factors of rupture and separation. What kind of answers can the design of spaces provide? That is the subject of this exhibition, a manifesto that seeks to put the spotlight on the architecture of these new locations. A long way from the twee neoclassical pastiche represented in the film “Amélie”, what this panorama of the modern city proposes is in fact a new urbanity, based on a selection of tested European experiments and upcoming projects. “Architecture on the move!” aims to be a sort of brainstorming operation about the modern city, where fluid networks have become the governing idiom. Going beyond the single-function thinking implicit in the question of transport provision and other techno engineering approaches to transport, “Architecture in motion!” focuses on new ways of living the city. Increasingly, other activities are starting to combine with the loci of mobility: for example the art gallery in Zurich grafted onto a tyre workshop, which itself connects to a station; the museum space that has evolved in the heart of a Cordoba bus station; the offices attached to a bridge roadway at the access to the A14 motorway in Nanterre. The aim, therefore, is not to construct a catalogue of innovative gadgets associated with movement and multimodality, but to focus on authentic city facilities imagined by teams of architects, town planners, landscapers... A new generation of car parks, of bridges, of stations, of offices, of shopping centres, and even of roundabouts … is emerging. Through the originality of the projects on show, whether planned or completed, the exhibition demonstrates that there is no contradiction between pleasure and comfort on the one hand, and durability and safety on the other. It is an invitation to travel – to take a stroll – through a land of modernity, to rediscover words (along with their underlying architectural concepts) as basic as walk along, cross, access, change, exchange, park, live… in short, to rediscover the other city. Francis Rambert Exhibition organisers: Didier Rebois, Director of the Clermont-Ferrand School of Architecture, General Secretary of EUROPAN, European federation of architecture competitions Francis Rambert, journalist, architecture critic for the Figaro, Scientific Director: François Ascher, Chair of the Scientific and Executive Committee of the Institut pour la ville en mouvement, lecturer at the French Town Planning Institute (University Paris 8) |
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