Grenoble Alpes Métropole (FR)

Inhabited milieu's challenges

Grenoble-Alpes Métropole is frequently identified by its proximity to the mountain massifs. However, it is the plain that is home to the majority of its inhabitants and their daily lives. Thus, beyond the majestic natural spaces of the Alps, Grenoble Alpes Métropole is seeking to reconnect the urban space and its inhabitants with large natural spaces that are integrated into the city and accessible to all. These natural areas are refuges of bio- diversity, and support leisure, recreational and mobility activities, of course, but they also have agricultural, economic and productive functions, and are linked to the risks of flooding, and it is in all of these aspects that they must be considered and planned.
The Park is partly the result of a distance from the river, as a protective reaction to the risk of flooding. Urban fabrics have developed with their backs to the river and the technical approach to the territory has until now favored a relationship with the river through the prism of technical infrastructures. The theme Living Cities questions this relationship with the natural elements, invites us to explore the diversity of the park’s qualities and to translate the facets of its habitability. The metropolitan technical equipment, the urban park, and the agricultural activities within the park lead us to study it as much from the angle of a produc- tive space as from that of a recreational space. The habitat, sometimes informal, and the movement axes invite us to question the habitability and the mobility. Biodiversity and the presence of water raise questions about the place of the living.

Questions to competitors

A process of arbitration, conception and implementation of projects is expected, which will open and connect the park to its environment, activate synergies and reveal the metabolisms at work in the park, make a project with water and its hazards and enhance the qualities of habitability of the site. It is a matter of defining common and replicable (and not duplicable) rules for the objects, projects and actions that take place there. These projects and actions can be classified according to their typology or the «situations» (spatial, temporal) to which they relate. How do these rules help to reveal the park, make it live and shine?
The process developed by the candidate teams can be applied to the two targeted project sites, but also to other sites identified by the candidates and considered strategic to their proposal.
It will also integrate a phasing, from short to long term and a transcalary work, from micro to macro, imme- diate actions allowing to make the park accessible, to improve its appropriation, to take care of the inter- faces between the projects in progress.
Several themes of the «living city» are prevalent in the Parc of the loops of the Isère and the approach by the «rules of the game» must allow to capture them practically and to translate them into the implementa- tion of a natural, urban and agricultural Park in the grip of current issues.