In english

Wastelands, abandoned industrial sites and warehouses, areas that aren’t marked on any map of the city, relics of an industrial past that has vanished or been relocated: these are “no-go areas” that have so far escaped the property speculators and been taken over by artists.
Writers, artists and sculptors, designers working in every imaginable genre and architects are transforming these city interstices into spaces where everything and anything becomes possible, where they can experiment with new forms of artistic and social practice.

To describe the evolution of these Utopian spaces, here we present an interview with the architect, Patrick Bouchain, Grounds for initiative.

Patrick Bouchain is particularly well-known for his designs for the Lieu Unique theatre in Nantes, the Volière Dromesko theatre in Rennes, the Fratellini Academy of Circus Arts in Saint Denis, the Condition Publique arts centre in Roubaix and Le Channel national theatre in Calais. He is also involved in the project to transform La Friche La Belle de Mai, in Marseille. He sees urban wastelands and abandoned industrial sites as places of freedom, places where the future of the City can be invented for the long-term.

Fred Kahn: Urban wasteland is more than just an opportunity for new architectural design, it is genuinely strategic space. Do you think the future of our cities will be played out at the edges?
Patrick Bouchain:  Society is becoming more and more standardized. The Law and regulations are applied in such an impersonal and abstract manner and this frees up space. Before, we used to be able to look at the city as a whole. Nowadays, such an all-encompassing vision has become extremely technocratic and some things get left by the wayside. The administrative and technical partitioning of space results in more areas that are caught “in-between”, areas that don’t belong to anyone. As Gilles Clément explained so well, with his concept of the Third Landscape (Tiers Paysage), these little plots of land that are not put to any commercial use are prime sites for encouraging biodiversity. When such spaces are abandoned, freedom can start to blossom. No society, however well-organized it may be, can foresee everything. These urban wastelands are not exempt from common law, but they do escape a hyper-standardized application of the regulations. They are the breeding grounds for taking the initiative.
The appropriation of such abandoned sites amounts to an intuitive approach to sustainable development: it’s making use of what society has thrown away. It involves producing work in places abandoned by the capitalist economy. This culture reflects a vision of economics: it makes use of what others have thrown away. It recycles and invents potential new uses.
I think that this very contemporary phenomenon will become more widespread in industrialized countries. Abandoned wasteland is not only a phenomenon of industrial areas, but also of farmland, and so on. And before long, it will include areas that no one currently sees as profitable. Peat bogs, deserts, the sea - perhaps places such as these will be occupied in surprising ways in the future.

F.K.: This kind of space is no longer seen as marginal by the powers that be. In fact, they have even been known to support such instances of re-appropriation. This is especially true in the case of La Friche la Belle de Mai, in Marseille. The users formed a cooperative to protect their common interests (an SCIC, or Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif) and the City Council granted them management rights over the site, under an emphyteutic lease.
P. B.: The initial purpose of the site has changed along the way, for a number of reasons. Just as sometimes you have to suspend building works if, when you‘re digging foundations, you uncover historical artefacts or ruins that must be conserved. At La Friche La Belle de Mai, the people involved didn’t act out of a desire to challenge the establishment, but rather out of a desire for active conservation. Not to conserve this heritage as it was, but to develop their activities. It’s an act of safeguarding our active heritage. This goes to show that there is no standard against which to measure culture other than the freedom to think and act.
This former tobacco factory was built by a state-owned national tobacco company, which, by building over-intensively on public space, falsely obtained every imaginable exemption going. But now, it is a different kind of activity altogether that is taking advantage of these same exemptions. The result of this lack of continuity between the plan and the actual project has served to make the uses of the site even more diverse.
Take social housing for example. The original intentions were good and generous: to provide housing for everyone. But such a one-tracked approach produced architectural design that has been closed to new ideas. The best places to live were not designed for housing. If architectural planning programmes were not as rigid as they are, then places would be much more liveable. We might analyze urban development by asking whether what has structured a city was actually ever planned. More often than not, the factors that have given shape to a city are the result of pure chance. In any case, it would be unreasonable to expect that a planning programme would meet people’s needs ad infinitum. The outcome may well be a development that the intended user finds unsatisfactory, but which satisfies the needs of other users at some point in the future.

F.K.: How do you go about meeting project requirements without planning facilities?
P. B.: Planning is often a way of avoiding responsibility for the risks involved, of not being accountable. Naturally, we need some kind of a framework, but one within which it is possible to experiment with different forms. We are now up against execution architecture, which is unreal and often inhumane. I am in favour of interpretive architecture…

F.K.: Isn’t your position somewhat “conservative”?
P. B.: I agree with Pasolini: you have to embrace the archaic if you want to be truly revolutionary. Our society, in the name of progress, is extremely destructive. You have to conserve in order to transmit knowledge. This doesn’t mean going back to some ideal original state, but, rather, forging our links with the past in order to go forward into the future. We need to draw on the past to have a sound base from which to advance into the future. Thus, at La Friche la Belle de Mai, we start with what is there already to plan uses that have yet to be imagined. If something doesn’t exist yet, it can’t be represented, so it’s impossible to plan for. All we can do is experiment with different frameworks. And, since we are moving forward without a safety net, we are all the more careful of what the users need.

Fred Kahn

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