“REINVENTING PARIS”, WHEN URBAN INNOVATION SURVIVES REGULATION

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Paris is a world-leading metropolis and a changing city. Since 2001, urban regeneration and the development of new districts have brought Paris into the 21th century. The city has returned to positive demographic dynamics and a greater social mix; it attracts young people and increasingly families, as well as entrepreneurs, researchers, artists, etc. Paris is also emerging as a leading business location which is competitive and attractive. The attention to the environment which has gone hand in hand with this revival has served to enhance quality of life and has helped uncover the priceless heritage of Paris. For a world-leading metropolis in constant interaction with other cities around the globe, urban innovation is an essential part of a project to be ever more attractive, sustainable, responsible and caring. This momentum must continue and even accelerate. It is imperative to be able to adapt to the challenges faced by cities in the 21st century. The concepts of “living together” evolve, the family unit is remodelled, the way we work, consume, move around, entertain ourselves changes and transforms individual and collective relationships within time and space. The public authorities must adapt and create the conditions to attract innovations and innovators from around the world. November 2014. After much teasing, the City of Paris unveiled the Call for Innovative Urban Projects, “REINVENTING PARIS”. The objective of this Call was to use innovation to achieve efficiency and urban quality. It is about building knowledge, combining visions, mobilising energy and gathering resources to build the most relevant and innovative projects. This call is part of an approach to innovation that aims to be as open as possible to stimulate the imagination, to unleash creativity and the emergence of new urban objects and new processes for designing the city. Innovation must indeed be a precursor of what will eventually become second nature to the city. The Call for Innovative Urban Projects is intended to garner collective expertise in order to be able to respond more accurately to changing needs and anticipate those to come in the future. The emergence of new urban objects and new processes for designing the city The purpose of this call was to select innovative urban projects or constructions with a view to their practical implementation in the short term in the Paris area. 23 different sites form a diverse supply of land and housing, spread over the Paris area and rapidly available. They comprise land and property owned by the City or its partners - social housing landlords or developers. These sites have different characteristics and are in different urban contexts, which needed to be understood by the project leaders. This diversity reflects the desire of the City to allow innovation to express itself in different urban contexts and in various formats. Of these sites, 13 are on undeveloped land or land which has buildings destined to be demolished. The other sites are built. Due to their era, architectural features or past uses, these buildings represent a wide range of Parisian built heritage. Some buildings are of heritage interest and are subject to protection as historic monuments or under the City of Paris Local Urban Development Plan. This protection has the effect of subordinating the issuing of planning permission to a conservation and enhancement objective. The challenge was to reconcile innovation and heritage preservation. For each of them, a specific procedure will be implemented so that the winning innovative project can be brought to fruition. The proposed urban innovations cover both content and form. For the content, innovative responses were provided in terms of project content, programme and technical specificities. The form related to proposed procedures, management methods, the form of partnerships and consultation, management procedures for deadlines and different project phases, and financing arrangements. The aim was to bring together different actors whether investors, architects, project owners, prime contractors, operators, users, researchers, artists, designers, start-ups, etc., to answer this call and turn the project into a reality. Innovation, in the sense of “doing better and differently”, must run through the entire project design from its genesis to its commissioning. It encompasses the project design, the participation of Parisians in the project design, the composition of the “project team, the programme, the architecture, respect for the environment, energy and biodiversity, building processes and materials, ... The dialogue and relationships with residents / users and the integration of projects into their environment and the opening of buildings to the public space were although key criteria to select the proposed projects. The objective was not to innovate on all fronts, but to identify which is the most relevant innovation on each site. Innovation cannot be defined a priori or in the abstract; it is alchemy of high standards, new technologies and a scrupulous understanding of the issues and needs it generates. Fulfilment of the municipalitys development objectives This Call for Innovative Urban Projects contributes to the fulfilment of the Paris municipality’s objectives. The innovative projects to be deployed will, each on their own scale, have to meet Parisian but also global challenges. It is one of the levers designed to effectively address the acute social and environmental issues. Housing is the biggest priority of the new term of office. It is the primary concern of Parisians as well as a factor of attraction for young people, the working population and a World City which is cosmopolitan in essence. During the past decade, policy in favour of a greater social mix has achieved 20% of assisted rental dwellings in the housing stock. Continuing such efforts is the first priority of the municipality. The aim is to create 10,000 units per year and to simultaneously boost the diversification of housing stock to reach a figure of 25% social housing in the stock by 2025. The environmental challenge also needs to be taken up in Paris. The objectives of the municipality are ambitious in this respect. They result from commitments adopted in various frameworks which guide public action and which, to be effective, must be shared by all actors (such as the Climate Plan, the Biodiversity Plan, etc.). They are specified over the time of the term of office, particularly in action to combat climate change, to conserve biodiversity and to increase plant life in the city. In this context, the main targets are to achieve 100 hectares of green roofs and facades, a third of which dedicated to the production of fruit and vegetables, to increase the number of trees by 20,000, to construct “zero waste, zero carbon” districts, to significantly boost recycling and composting, to improve energy recovery and to strengthen the “green” and “blue” infrastructures endorsed by the Grenelle process with guidelines for land, waterway and wetlands management, and to ensure ecological continuity within the city. Each piece of the urban puzzle must strive to limit its carbon footprint and contribute to strengthening biodiversity and the promotion of nature within the city. It is the condition for making the city more resilient to climate change and more energy efficient, in short more sustainable and more liveable. Each of the innovative proposed projects fits in with this requirement. In its design, technical specifics, programming and integration into the immediate and metropolitan environment, each project must demonstrate its contribution to a sustainable and intelligent city. This will be expressed both through the Мастерская 102 use of new technologies such as renewable energy, smart grids and new practices around the circular economy for example, and in the project’s ability to adapt, accompany or even create new lifestyles. Our sociological structure is continually changing; ways of living, working, consuming, entertaining ourselves and living together are also changing dramatically. City users yearn for a new response to these changes. The Paris region transport network which will become denser with the Grand Paris Express is a powerful lever of mobility. But the scale of proximity - of the building, the block and the district - should play more of a role in the design of the city. New urban objects, new types of places and new practices must emerge in the city. The city must also provide new services, for example relating to agriculture, urban logistics and the pooling of services to monitor these developments, while seeking to operate in an efficient, rational, co-operative and more environmentally friendly manner. 9 challenges of innovation Choices in terms of innovation were made by the candidates regarding the site, its configuration, methods of urban integration, environment and land potential. The objective was not to innovate on all fronts, but to identify which was the most relevant innovation on each site. Innovation cannot be defined a priori or in the abstract; it is an alchemy of high standards, new technologies and a scrupulous understanding of the issues and needs it generates. The candidates to the call had to address 9 challenges of innovation. These areas of innovation could not be considered as exhaustive. However, it is clear that the inclusion of a significant number of these challenges were valued in the winning projects: - Innovation is first and foremost a question of uses - Innovation is social: adapting, anticipating new lifestyles - Innovation is about participation and consultation - Innovation is promoting Parisian heritage - Innovation is inhabiting new places and developing new services - Innovation should aim for resiliency and energy efficiency - Innovation must contribute to the attractiveness and prestige of Paris - Innovation means doing better and faster - Innovation means finding viable economic models The pooling of spaces and merging of functions are ways of creating new social bonds and greater inclusiveness, developing intergenerational synergies, reducing mobility needs, creating shared ownership of property, etc. - the “plural” building which combines various functions - housing, office space, common parts, showrooms, a decentralised datacentre - promotes mixed uses within the same individual building and no longer just on the scale of the block or the district; -the “mutable” building which, by integrating modularity from the outset, takes into account the evolutions of society and the city’s new life phases, for example a reduction in the lifetime of shops, the transience of certain sporting, recreational, cultural activities, etc. It is a building that anticipates these future changes according to changing needs; - the “shareable” building that takes into account “urban chronotopia”, integrating alternative uses according to the time of day or week. This is a way of sharing places, assigning them to multiple uses depending on the period. It is directly counter to specialisation, which sometimes limits the use or utility of a building over time. Lots of winning projects proposes to rethink ways of living through “social innovation”: adapting to the changes in the Parisian population, aging and new health requirements; new spaces shared between homes, social ties. They although aim to rethink ways of working: adapting to mobile workers and telecommuters, building home-office spaces, co-working, a new type of incubator with employees of large companies and SMEs who have chosen open innovation. And most of these projects rethink ways of doing business: temporary stores, fab labs, shared showrooms which allow shopkeepers and craftsmen to experiment and share their resources. Innovation stronger than regulation When the City of Paris launched this call for urban projects, it probably did not consider the full implications of this idea. Although the command stimulated the 372 candidate teams, it also incited elected representatives and urban planning administration to reinvent the commission’s framework. The juries awarded the idea of prototypes and the teams demonstrated huge  Carte schématisée des 23 sites de l’appel à projets Innovative Project. 2016. Т1. № 2 103 creativity with regard to the purpose of the sites, and by opening them to various types of occupants, sometimes to the point of creating utopias. How can the City of Paris make sure that the programs are complied with once the site or building is sold, in particular the most innovative one? How can we enhance the profitability of these “alien building” that have never been built before? Safeguard provisions are developed concerning the property possession periods, the terms of their use and their possible resale. How do you guarantee the future of uses chosen by the jury that do not exist yet, without infringing on ownership rights? Legal innovations are one of the answers, which were explored throughout the process. The lucky 22 teams chosen by the jury undertake and are duty-bound to build their project and to fulfil all their innovative promises.

About the authors

Nicolas Ledoux

Algoe Consultants Paris, France

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