The City of Paris is launching a call for innovative urban projects and offering 23 sites to all professionals where they can develop theri ideas and express their talents. More information here.
A city like Paris must be able to reinvent itself at every moment in order to meet the many challenges facing it. Particularly in terms of housing and everything relating to density, desegregation, energy and resilience. It is important in today's world to find new collective ways of working that will give shape to the future metropolis.
We are launching this call for innovative urban projects in order to prefigure what the Paris of tomorrow might be. Each team is invited to present its ideas on how to bring added vitality to exceptional Parisian sites. The winners will then be able to purchase or rent the terrains in order to carry out their projects while simultaneously conducting an urban experiment on an unparalleled scale.
I hope that each team deploys its creativity freely in order to imagine the projects they would like to see realized in the coming years. The teams will consist of original and unconventional groups in which all disciplines can be represented, reinventing our ways of living, working, exchanging and sharing in Paris.
Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris.
Jean-Louis Missika (Deputy Mayor of Paris in charge of town planning, architecture, the Greater Paris projects, economic development and attractiveness) said.-
The "Reinventing Paris" call for projects should enable you to experiment and give concrete shape to the range of innovations that Paris needs. Far from limiting themselves merely to architectural audacity, your projects can address innovation in all its dimensions. The objective is not to innovate on all fronts but to seek out, for each site, the most pertinent type of innovation and reveal cutting-edge solutions.
First of all innovation in terms of usage, designing pluralistic buildings that are adaptable and intelligent. The rapid changes in city life styles call for innovation in ways of living, revealing shared and user-friendly spaces, in ways of working, thanks to co-working, teleworking, incubators of a new kind, and in ways of doing business, with shared showrooms, fablabs and ephemeral shops. Invent new services adapted to the health and ageing demands of Parisians.
Paris is facing massive environmental challenges that call for original solutions. Buildings demonstrate environmental innovation by revolutionizing energy production, consumption and recovery. By interacting intelligently with their block and the whole city, by integrating ecological materials, by experimenting with innovative planting and by achieving the target of "zero waste, zero carbon".
Innovation also means investing in new spaces: basements, roofs, wasteland, the Périphérque and all the abandoned spaces that sometimes represent the future of our metropolis.
Lastly, innovating is just as much doing something different as doing something differently: the whole project design can be a source of innovation. From the make-up of the team to consulting with local residents, from site management to financing. It's up to you to reinvent our ways of building today.
The expression of interest phase ends on 31 January 2015.
