50.000 Logements

The consultation on ’50,000 dwellings around public transportation routes’ focuses on ways to coordinate the construction of new housing for the Bordeaux metropolitan region following the development of a new tram system and the arrival of a high-speed train connecting the city with Paris, two mobility offers making the city and its periphery more attractive. What the project reflects upon is not a city in the ‘classic’ sense, but a contemporary, sustainable city, defined by a shift from monumentality to mobility, envisaged from the perspective of the city dweller. Contemporary urbanity no longer resembles the urban conditions of the past; now you can ‘make a city’ by seeing housing and transport as the main drivers of a metropolitan living environment.

By coupling the two components of housing and transport, it becomes possible to re-urbanize suburbia by conceiving housing as a dynamic system and inscribing the 50,000 new homes within a metropolitan framework based on movement. The environment of a ‘well-connected’ home is not just a physical space: it is also a space-time containing a multitude of choices and differentiated urban environments, managing to turn Bordeaux into a real metropolis that is able to meet all the needs of its current and future inhabitants.

The starting point of this reflection was for us less a specific spatial concept than a methodology. After conducting a first reading of the metropolitan region, we were able to isolate a set of specific conditions of the metropolis that guided the subsequent reflection and were used as a basis to formulate four urban hypotheses: dwelling + transportation = city; territorial predominance; scales of diversity; horizontal density and emerging density.

Following this step, we outlined operational concepts mapping the potential and providing strategies for the interpretation of the different types of parcels encountered. The test projects that followed the study made it possible to draw up an inventory of specific architectural typologies capable of activating those operational concepts in site-specific ways, establishing a relationship between territory and specific typologies. Our reflection, therefore, laid out an approach, a set of ambitions and postures capable of guiding the development of the metropolis in a supple and dynamic way: more than a master plan, we conceived a development frame anchored in the context of the Bordeaux territory.


  • Location

    Bordeaux, France

  • Client

    Communauté urbaine de Bordeaux (CUB)

  • Description

    Territorial Strategy

  • Completion

    2010

  • Exhibition

    2012

  • In collaboration with

    GRAU

  • 51N4E project team

    Johan Anrys, Freek Persyn, Peter Swinnen, Matthieu Moreau, Paul Steinbrück, Annaik Deceuninck, Charlotte Schmidt, Brenda De Neve, Aglaia De Mulder, Thomas Naessens, Yannick Vanhaelen

  • 51N4E involvement

    Lead Architect

  • Consultants

    IDEA Consult (economic analysis), Dominique Boudet (architecture and communication)

  • Landscape

    Agence Laverne

  • Sustainability

    3E

  • Programme

    Dwelling, infrastructures, retail, landscape

  • Image credits

    51N4E/GRAU