If perpetual, resource-intensive growth is no longer a viable model for the development of a city-region, what alternatives are available? In City Eco Lab, we explored the idea that St Etienne’s river, le Furan, and the natural systems of the broader region, might be a fruitful basis for re-imagining the city. It was in this […]
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City Eco Lab: St Etienne’s Soupe de Ville (City Soup)
Architects are sometimes accused of being more at home in a world of abstraction than in the here-and-now. Nonsense! A team from St Etienne’s architecture school disproved this vile calumny with a wonderful project called Soupe de Ville (City Soup). Having first done a beautiful job documenting sites around the city where food could potentially […]
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City Eco Lab: de-motorisation at different scales
A key principle of City Eco Lab was to focus on live projects and enterprises rather than on good ideas in abstract. The city’s dynamic new courier company, Les Coursiers Verts (The Green Courier Company), took us at our word and relocated their office to the City Eco Lab site for the duration of the […]
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City Eco Lab: “hybrid reality story scripts” about creative communities
Traditionally, the regeneration of a city has focused on its built fabric; architects and designers propose ways to upgrade or replace the old streets like the one above in St Etienne. In City Eco Lab, the focus was less on buildings, than on activities that would represent more sustainable ways of organising daily life. The […]
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City Eco Lab: neighbourhood energy dashboard
In the central space of City Eco Lab, a variety of live projects were on show that dealt with energy, water and mobility. Two key questions emerged: What variables make a neighbourhood sustainable, or not? And how do you measure them? Magalie Restalo, a designer from St Etienne, presented the prototype of an energy and […]
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City Eco Lab: soft tools for sharing
The “Soft” department (above) within the City Eco Lab’s Cabane a Outils (Tool Shed) presented a variety of soft tools such as software platforms, new economic models, and design research networks. The aim was to make visitors aware of the existence of such ‘soft’ tools and present a selection so that they would not be […]
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City Eco Lab: open source hardware
Many of the goods and services we take for granted in our daily lives depend on global flows and networks that seem to be unraveling in today’s converging crises. Are doomed to return to a pre-industrial, pre-technological age? If Jean-Noël Montagné (above, left – with Juha Huuskonen on the right) is around, tools and technologies […]
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City Eco Lab: Map Room
The focus of City Eco Lab was on live projects from the city-region – but we wanted to place these in the context of the bigger picture. We therefore invited The Why Factory, from TU Delft in the Netherlands, to present their “Green Dreams” maps in our Salle des Cartes (Maps Room). The project was […]
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City Eco Lab: the art of food proximity
“Let’s keep food around us” says Debra Solomon of her presentation at City Eco Lab: Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking. It’s is a working example of how a community can optimize its food flow using design. “New (food) products are not the answer” says Solomon; “new platforms, new actors, new configurations are”. There are a lot […]