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 designer Francois Jegou asked people from St Etienne to imagine their current life using solutions that reduced their impact on the environment and also regenerated the social fabric around them.
The result was a series of 13 “story scripts” that were shown on small screens in City Eco Lab (below).
These visions are “realist and pragmatic”, Jegou explains. “They show solutions that already exist in Saint-Étienne – imminent projects here, or solutions that exist elsewhere.”
For Jegou, these story scripts form “hybrid realities” that are realistic enough to make us question our own lifestyles, but still sufficiently open-ended for us to be able to adapt them to our own lives.
The resulting series of images are like little photo-novels which together present several solutions and a multi-faceted vision from the citizens’ point of view.
Jegou’s project at City Eco Lab continues his pioneering work on social innovation and design for sustainability.
Further details are here and here.
And here you can download free Jegou’s book “Collaborative Services, social innovation & design for sustainability”
