RéinventerParis : inventing new places for the people
At the end of 2014, the city of Paris decided to launch an international competition for innovative urban projects: « Reinventer Paris ». 23 sites were proposed to experiment not only new forms of architecture but also new ways of conceiving the city, collaborating with others stakeholders, bringing new ideas to the urban fabric.
A group of graduate students from SciencesPo, with their academic advisor and theirs teachers, decided to participate to the competition and went on building a team with young architects and a audacious developer: Brémond.
We chose to pick up one specific site, the former music school of the 13th borough, big enough for our innovation, small enough to stay focus on one specific goal.
The concept we wanted to test is a prototype for what could become a new generation of People’s house, a place where we could work, engage with the community, live and think.
« Metro, boulot, dodo » (« Metro, work, sleep »), this famous French sentence used to define the way we were living in modern, or let’s even say, post modern cities. Our lives were organized by the strict distinction between these three activities and all urban policies were focused on facilitating and fostering these three main issues : how do we improve transport (mainly public transport system), how do we accommodate people, how do we create jobs ?
This has progressively changed in the last decade but it’s now accelerating at a dramatic pace. The frontiers between the working place and our home are getting blurred, thanks to the diffusion of new technologies and also due the kind of jobs we’re looking for. We work in our flats and we like to interact while being at the office. It explains the huge development of coworking places nowadays in many cities throughout the world. Not a week without the opening of a new trendy workplace where autonomous workers or start-up entrepreneurs are gathering.
This is an obvious trend in cities where the creative sector is playing a strong role in the economic growth and we are probably still on our way to absorb this transformation in the conception of office spaces.
But we were not interested in designing a new coworking place, everyone is doing that and they are mostly for entrepreneurs who do have the ability to cultivate autonomy, not really for the regular guy or for the older or for the younger.
What we wanted to create was a new « public space », adapted to our new ways of living, in phase with the new technologies but also a space which might contribute to a higher general interest. When the first « Maison de la Culture » was imagined in the 60’s under the influence of the French writer André Malraux, at the time Minister of Culture, the basic idea behind was : in order to give true access to culture, which was the main objective of Malraux, it is not enough to provide free books and free entrance to the concerts, you have to imagine a place, not far from where you live, nice and convenient, where you would come, have a look, chat, and maybe attend a play or a concert, it would be part of your daily environment.
That is what we meant with our Maison13urbaine. But we think that maybe the most crucial stake in our megacities is to invent the new place where people would join because they want to physically engage with their communities, help each other…. We wanted a place where people would like to visit because they have something to ask or to share, not a social service where people don’t want to be seen as asking for something, not a charity because we don’t always want to get involved in complex organizations. It’s a normal place, yet confortable, but with a meaning. Those who would come don’t automatically share the same values, don’t belong to the same social class, but they want to live in a city where relations are more important than consumption.
That’s why we created the Maison13urbaine, a kind a club for altruistic people, where you get access and become a member only if you justify your will to participate to the improvement of your social environment. It’s a place where NGO can get a room for their meetings, where young researchers, workers can find a desk at a low price to work on their projects, where you can also organize activities for the older, analphabet, whoever in so far as you can demonstrate that your action could have an added value for the community.
It is also a place where we will organize conferences, workshops about social innovation in cities, where universities can organize labs with their students.
It is finally also a place where you can buy a flat at an affordable price or rent a room if you’re a researcher with little money.
The Maison13urbaine is the new concept place for an inclusive city, a city that takes care, thinks and innovates.