Greater Geneva Metropolitan Strategic Plan

In search of singular ecologies

As part of the international consultation ‘Visions prospectives pour le Grand Genève’, the ‘La grande traversée’ team proposed to set off in search of the ‘singular ecologies’ of the cross-border metropolis.

To implement this ambition, in 2019 the team undertook a major crossing, both physical – of the metropolitan territory – and metaphorical – of the themes of ecological transition. Based on the hypothesis that a culture of circularity, consultation and cooperation has long existed in the Franco-Vaud-Geneva region, an initial collection of successful initiatives enabled us to identify a series of transitional ‘objects’, ‘subjects’ and ‘projects’. By systematically exploring these, we were able to identify three conditions for the singularity of these ecologies: the ‘island of experimentation’, the ‘cross-border passage’ and the ‘watershed’, in the course of alternating collective walks in situ and discussions of the actions collected.

Four fields of reference have also guided the exploration.

-The first concerns the rewilding of natural and anthropogenic processes – taking the measure of the ‘wild part’ of the territory that must be preserved in order to survive. The structural ecological crisis is forcing us to move away from the use of compensatory concepts towards refounding concepts of metabolism, biodiversity and health, which eco-urbanism must now seek to promote as a means of fostering the intimate link between man and the rest of the living world. In particular, this covers all the actions that can be implemented to give back to the land a potential for regenerating wasteland or fallow land, converting sites with undetermined uses, and giving new symbolism to land that is not very accessible or deliberately ignored.

-The second explores the territories of living. The aim here is to ensure that a type of housing can no longer be designed without taking into account the transitional effects it can produce in terms of low-carbon or shared mobility, short supply chains, consumption of energy, materials or information, or the diversification of communal spaces. Inhabitants’ co-operatives, as a contributory model for property development and the enhancement of know-how, are a particularly good example of the “ecological” and “transitional” legitimacy that is a source of meaning and hospitality.

-The third is to systematise the contractualisation of exchanges. In this case, the emphasis is on the need to manage material, decision-making or energy exchanges with an ecological purpose, by reinventing new forms of reciprocal contracts between players – charters, values, common rules, private or public labels, recommendations or expert opinions, etc. – in order to redefine, over and over again, what the ‘common good’ is or is not in a given situation, and to prefigure, through the project, a normative framework for the future.

-The fourth promotes the invention of a third, oblique, intermediate or transverse scale, in other words a scale that is never given but always to be constructed or reconstructed, depending on the local and circumstantial situation of the project. There is no universal recipe for implementing the transition, but there are projects to be carried out in concrete, embodied territories that are clearly differentiated according to their ‘singular ecology’ and ‘resilient value chains’.
These have been developed by calling on the players directly concerned and by more systematically investigating the real conditions of transitional change in the three areas: the Archamps-Bardonnex agropole, the Geneva-Europe airport and railway station, and the Thônex-Vallard free trade zone

‘La grande traversée’ would like to thank the entire team at Fondation Braillard Architectes and all the people
(residents, technicians, members of associations, elected representatives, etc.) who took part in the walks
during the walks, tables and discussions.

Team «La grande traversée»

• Franck Hulliard, Alizée Moreux – INterland,
• Nicolas Tixier, Charles Ambrosino – Bazar Urbain,
• Pascal Amphoux – Contrepoint, projets urbains
• Miguel Georgieff – Coloco,
• Benoît Molineaux, Uli Amos – Coopérative Équilibre,
• Adrian Torres-Astaburuaga, Michel Lussault, Valérie Disdier – École urbaine de Lyon

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