Collective Unit - Julia Tournaire, Marie-Charlotte Dalin

The adaptable city is the city that presents the ability to incorporate within its development the contemporary practices of its inhabitants and to embody their common desires. We believe that the urban and architectural project emerges from the resulting encounter between the urban substrate and the ‘citizens’ practices. In Paris as in other major metropolis, one-person households are soon to be more numerous than typical couple households. There, single persons, independent workers, business travellers abound. As they are simultaneously living in very different places among the whole city and even the whole world, these poly-topical individuals could represent the “neo-nomadics” people of the contemporary metropolis. The strip of land between the Boulevards des Maréchaux and the ring plays a significant role in Paris urban organisation. Besides its important infrastructure facilities recently completed by the tramway, it hosts most of the Parisian collective programs. Large-scale school and sport facilities, as well as cemeteries and collective housing occupy the space of this unique piece of territory. For this reason, we regard the strip to be the collective and infrastructural strip of Paris: a metropolitan figure that accommodates cohabiting daily practices and connects the different urban conditions that shape the historic city and the Greater Paris. If we consider the main role of public authorities is the supply of appropriate facilities, thus a new type of infrastructure should be planned. We assume that the “collective strip” provides the perfect condition for it to take place. We propose the ring strip of Paris get provided with “Collectiv Units”. They could be deemed as ‘ordinary monuments’ that embody the contemporary urban culture of the city. By enabling the independence and the creativity of neo-nomadic people, and promoting their cohabitation and collaboration, this new facility aims to insert their instability in the metropolis system. This new infrastructure aims to provide a rich range of interrelationship between the single individual itself and the whole urban territory. To that purpose, this relationship should be a direct relationship that is to say without any intermediary. According to us, the concept of adaptability lies precisely in allowing a relation between independent units within the city without graduate and hierarchical process and spaces. Influenced by the qualities of its situation, the unit located Porte des Poissonniers intends to aggregate 190 living units in one sole building. Thanks to the proposed spatial system, these cohabiting units are directly connected to their urban environment. They are completely independent, self-organized and free to choose their occasional collaborations.

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