Interview with Ido Avissar of l'AUC

Before taking part in City Visions, l'AUC already designed a competition entry for the Mériadeck, a huge building conglomerate from the 1960s and 1970s in the centre of Bordeaux. So you knew the city before?

Yes, we knew it a bit.

Had you only been to the centre or did you already know the periphery as well?

Not at all, we had only visited the centre. The periphery is also new to us.

So what do you think about the task of developing propositions for some forgotten green spaces in the periphery?

In a way I think it's a bit bizarre. Bordeaux has so many strategic areas – the docklands, the new district around the TGV station, a lot of sites in the centre and so on. Strangely, our sites are all very close to those strategic places. So I don't quite understand what they expect from us. I don't think that they want us to reflect too much about all the other projects which they're doing. But it might still be interesting to develop a new vision for Bordeaux through a non-strategic site.

Do you think that the organizers expect a landscape design or rather an architectural or urbanistic plan?

They said landscape. The six sites are all close to the ringroad, so the surroundings are quite tough. We never talked about the road, however. In Pilsen everybody talked about the road, telling us how terrible it is. Here nobody said anything about it. They all talked about nature and landscape. We'll have to think about that.

I think that in a way there's a certain degree of similarity between Pilsen and Bordeaux. Pilsen also has the suburbs, surrounding the core of the city, but not directly linked to it by city fabric. So it's also something in-between a continuous city and a network city.

Well, Bordeaux certainly isn't a continuous city. That's quite clear. Even the UNESCO heritage area isn't continuous, because there are some brutal ruptures inside it, like the Mériadeck. But I'm also not sure whether it's a network city. The problem with French cities is very often that they have highly attractive centres which used to draw everything in from the surrounding areas, until the cities started to spread out in the 20^th century. So there's a kind of radiocentric city, but it's not really a non-hierarchical network. Sometimes it's hard to figure out a model for the city without over-simplifying it.

Do you see any other similarities between Pilsen and Bordeaux?

 

Both cities have a bit of topography, and the social housing estates were placed on the hills. That's quite interesting. What's also similar is the way in which the municipalities  envisaged the connection of these areas to the city centre. In Pilsen, the socialist regime has left behind a trauma, which is understandable, of course, and nobody has too many good things to say about it. But for us, it was quite astonishing when we saw social housing at a distance of 20 kilometres from the city centre, but rather well-connected to the centre. That doesn't exist in France. Here we're just beginning to create connections, e.g. with the tram in Bordeaux. So in this sense, Pilsen is more of a network city than Bordeaux. I don't know if the socialist planning system is responsible for this, but it has a certain efficiency and openness to it.

The reason for that might also be that the city centre of Pilsen is so tiny. It covers a mere 16 blocks, so it probably has never been such a powerful magnet as the centre of Bordeaux.

Yes, but you also have a certain porosity in Pilsen. There's a much more natural transition between the centre and the suburbs.

The task in Bordeaux is quite open: you may choose one of the sites, design something for all of them or even come up with your own site. Do you already know whether you will focus on a specific site or whether you'll aim at developing a more general strategy?

I think we'll try to do both, by developing a strategy that can be applied to several sites, but also focussing on one or two which we can look at in more detail. Maybe we'll go for the site close to the airport. Airports are attractors and repulsors at the same time. In Paris, for example, there are predictions that 15 years from now, the plots around Charles de Gaulle airport will be more expensive than any plots in the city centre. It's nearly unbelievable when you go there now, because at the moment there's really no city there. It's an urbanism of interior worlds. We find this situation very interesting. Maybe we can work with that.

Interview by Anneke Bokern for City Visions Europe.