E14 Winning Teams Portraits/Interviews

Manufacture de terroirs

Guebwiller (FR) - Special Mention

Team Representative: Morvan Rabin  (FR) – geographer
Associate: Sylvie Florette (HR) - urbanist architect

See the complete portrait here
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M. Rabin & S. Florette

We used on the re-interpretation of Patrick Geddes's formula: "it takes the whole region to make the city". The main question of the project, thus, explores to what extent all the productions of a region can generate a productive city. Between the plain of Alsace and the Vosges mountains, in the crossing of Florival and the wine trail, Guebwiller can indeed mobilize its ‘terroirs’ to reconvert its brownfields sites. Two movements are for it necessities. 
The first one involves rethinking the relationship between the territory and economy, in passing of a territory support of the Economy in a generative territory of productions. 
The second consists in spreading the logic of the existing ‘terroirs’ (wines of Alsace, Munster cheese, etc.) to a panel of less exceptional activities and not necessarily related to food. The North of Guebwiller can become a "factory of terroirs", bridgehead of local craft sectors, of which some are re-revitalizing (wood of Vosges, cereal of the plain of Alsace, etc.) when others remain to invent (recycling of building materials; construction in hiding and sands reused: adobe, rammed earth, local concrete, bricks...). A first sketch of potential sectors was proposed, that a real project will have to specify and to structure.