HOTEL METROPOLE
STRATEGY
LIVING IN THE
GRAND PARIS
RESEARCH
RE–003
The metropolitan fabric of the Paris region is not the same as the urban fabric. The former incorporates elements that are not found in the latter. The urban fabric, that of the city, has a certain continuity: continuity of buildings, continuity of public space, continuity of routes and uses, from the center to the administrative boundaries of the city. While there may sometimes be continuity in the fabric and seams in uses, at the metropolitan level what we see are breaks created by geography, discontinuities and traumas caused in particular by the transport infrastructure framework.
The city and the metropolis are two different territorial realities, filters that interact, intersect, and overlap. The metropolitan scale does not negate the lower scales of the territory, nor is it the extended city; these are two scales necessary for understanding and describing the contemporary human experience, reflecting fundamental and complementary aspirations. There is a latent tension between the fundamental need to live, to locate oneself, to build one’s own space, and the need to experience the collective and shared belonging, the network, to free oneself from the specificities of space.
The leap in scale makes it possible to grasp—within the limits of what can be represented—the existence of a critical mass of information, movements, and practices within a territory whose boundaries are of little importance. We want to build a system capable of producing urbanity from what is specifically metropolitan, of transforming the kinetic energy released daily on a metropolitan scale and translating it into the territories it irrigates.
Traditionally, living somewhere means settling down, forming a bond of attachment, closeness, and affection with the place where you are, where you return. It is the territory of the “I,” which finds its translation in architecture in the allegory of the house, the cabin, or the roof. Our understanding of the metropolitan phenomenon has led us to construct a typology of specifically metropolitan housing, in response to the intuition that we do not live in the metropolis in the same way that we live in a town or village, that we are not “Greater Parisians” or “Ile-de-France residents” in the same way that we are Parisians, Melunais or Courneuvien.
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PROGRAM
“Hôtel Métropole” is a research project born out of the Atelier International du Grand Paris (AIGP), which proposes to rethink the fragmented map of the Greater Paris metropolitan area using fictional cartography. The system put in place maximizes the potential of existing land awaiting possible redevelopment, gently infiltrating urbanity without imposing a single model of city.
DETAIL
Situation
Paris, France
Year
En cours
Statut
Atelier international du Grand Paris (AIGP), Groupement d’intérêt public (GIP), Paris
Sponsor
Scientific advisory board, international research and experimentation workshop
Lead architect and urban planner
Dominique Perrault Architecte
Urbanist
Jean-Louis Subileau
Philosopher
Frédéric Migayrou
Mathematicien
Henri Berestycki
Filmmaker and producer
Richard Copans
DESCRIPTION
“Hôtel Métropole” is a project born out of the Atelier International du Grand Paris, which proposes to rethink the fragmented map of the Greater Paris metropolitan area based on its major facilities—hospitals, prisons, courts, universities, shopping centers, etc.—which form a constellation of essential places but without structures for living there. Wherever the metropolis forces people to come, “Hôtel Métropole” invents a right to stay. It is a response to these forced movements, these real-life displacements, whether endured or chosen, which are shaping a different geography of the metropolis. Around these hubs of use, the concept of “Hôtel Métropole” imagines a network of places to sleep, telework, receive visitors, and shelter, a room open to the metropolis, in order to reduce forced travel and inhabit the map of uses in a different way. More than a building, it is a minimal, flexible device that can be installed on existing land awaiting redevelopment: a way of infiltrating urbanity, accompanying real lives, without imposing a single model of the city. Fictional cartographies offer an interpretation of metropolitan constellations to draw a map of services rather than a political or administrative map, because the metropolis is not a continuous city, but a collection of scattered histories and needs. It is a tool to make the city livable where it is not, a mobile, pragmatic, and deeply human urbanity project.
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Living in Greater Paris means:
– having access to the metropolitan network and services without discrimination;
– recognizing that we no longer live as we once did, that the economy of space, movement, and time is no longer what it was thirty years ago, and proposing, without imposing, a new way of situating oneself in a territory that is much richer than the city;
– being clear-eyed about the metropolitan socio-economic configuration: land scarcity, changes in the traditional family, longer life expectancy, the complexity of construction, tertiarization, internationalization, and virtualization of lifestyles, etc.;
– Provide concrete, realistic solutions, in terms of time and resources, to produce housing for a population with urgent, occasional, or frequent housing needs.
– distribute facilities across the metropolitan area in a balanced manner to make up for the Paris metropolitan area’s shortcomings in terms of accommodation, because although the metropolitan area is home to nearly 12 million people in the Île-de-France region, it is also a place where people arrive (38,000 new households per year) and a place where people live temporarily (1,500 foreign researchers, 10 million business tourists, 625,000 university students, etc.), a place that must produce structures to respond to situations of precariousness and suffering (500,000 precarious jobs, 25,000 divorces per year, 17% of the population hospitalized for short stays, etc.).
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