Planning and Designing Greater Paris in the 21st Century

Venue: B117 Theatre, Basement level, Melbourne School of Design

Presenters: Professor Jean-Louis Cohen

The planning and design of the city of Paris and its surrounding region has been a difficult issue since the middle of the 19th century. This lecture discusses the shaping of a new creative scene for the region inspired by innovative strategies from 2007 to today.

Class issues and political conflicts have long prevented the development of a comprehensive metropolitan strategy for Paris. A 2007 closed competition launched by then president Nicolas Sarkozy was a significant turning point, with the goal of defining powerful projects around the central city.

In 2009 dozens of architects – from Yves Lion to Jean Nouvel, Richard Rogers and Bernardo Secchi – along with landscape designers and social scientists proposed a series of innovative strategies, which are now slowly being implemented. The central municipality also engaged a ‘reinvention’ program of several key sites in 2015, while many new transit hubs emerged in the suburbs.

Against the threat faced by the French capital of becoming a vast open-air museum, the projects inspired by these policies are shaping a new creative scene, which will be discussed in this lecture its many dimensions.

Jean-Louis Cohen is the Sheldon H Solow Chair for the History of Architecture at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, and a guest professor at the Collège de France.

The lecture will be introduced by Philip Goad, Professor of Architecture at the University of Melbourne.

from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/8920-planning-and-designing-greater-paris-in-the-21st-century