Interview with Stéphane Hirschberger, architect and landscape architect

The sites chosen for the teams in Bordeaux are all forgotten stretches of land, close to the ringroad. After hearing several opinions about this task, there seem to be two different ways of looking at Bordeaux: one can see it as a network city with green links connecting the components of the network, or one can see it as a continuous city with a lot of ruptures in its texture. Which position do you represent?

I don't know if that's the general view. It depends on your background. Someone from the city planning authority, who is in charge of economic, spatial, agricultural and infrastructural systems, naturally thinks in systems. If you ask a landscape architect, on the other hand, they usually see the territory as something which is composed of different natural elements. And then there's the visitors' perspective. Visitors can see only what's in front of them. If a visitor is a network person, they'll see the network and its discontinuity, and they'll recognize this discontinuity as a chance.

Am I right that you're in favour of the network-option?

Well, at any rate I don't know if continuity is in itself a cardinal virtue. We have to manage the infrastructure, but we shouldn't see barriers and frontiers everywhere. Especially politicians have to understand that the cards have to be re-dealt. The question is how to convince them.

What do you think is the potential of the green left-over spaces in Bordeaux?

The centre of Bordeaux is a heritage site, but the agglomeration as a whole is very rich in green space. The problem is that those green spaces are usually private property. Often they're destroyed when they're sold to people who don't care. The main task should be to control these territories. If you do that, you can maintain this framework of green spaces and turn it into a structure. There are many natural corridors, which are public ground because they're flood areas. But the private corridors are endangered. And the culture of property is very difficult to change.

A lot of these areas are inaccessible. Even if they're not private property, they're not areas which normal citizens would enter. That's probably one of the reasons why people experience them as barriers.

That's right, but in some cases they could be integrated into the public system. It could be a wonderful project to create a green network with this heritage of beautiful trees and gardens. That's exactly how the Parc des Coteaux on the right bank of the Garonne was created: the estates of several old manors were fused to create a huge new public garden. The Parc des Jalles in the north of Bordeaux is different, because it's about urban agriculture, it's not a leisure park. People live there and cultivate the ground and earn their living from it.

What's the value of such an area as the Parc des Jalles for the city?

That's difficult to define. If you say that it has a cultural value, you trivialize it and reduce it to a touristic level. It's rather a symbolic value, keeping farmers in the city. In addition, it would be impossible for the municipality to take care of 5000 hectares of ground anyway. You need landscape agents. The landscape architect Jacques Simon once wrote with a tractor in a field: "Without farmers I get bored. The earth." If we want to have green corridors and large green spaces, we need people to take care of them.

Do you think that these corridors have to stay green at all cost? Or would it be an option to build there and turn them into parts of the urban fabric?

Some of the corridors are flood areas and one can't build on them anyway. If you check the map of Bordeaux, you'll see that there are quite a lot of them. But I don't think that it has to be a dogma to keep all of them green. We have to check this, location for location. It can be a guideline, but one has to verify it.

What do you hope the City Visions teams can contribute to this discussion?

I think that they can contribute their experiences from other European cities and countries. Cultures might differ, but phenomenons are the same. It will be difficult for the teams, however. They work on really forgotten sites, and it's a bit like being dropped from a helicopter with blinded eyes.

Do you agree with the selection of sites for the project?

Yes. Well, for a project like this, there are always two options: one can choose a site which is representative of five problems, or one can choose one problem – emptiness and nature in this case –, find several exemplary sites and then compare the suggestions. I think both are legitimate strategies.

The problem chosen for this project is an interesting and very important one.  And I'm glad that for once, it's not about the centre of Bordeaux. Working in the centre of Bordeaux as an architect is like working on a historical painting with a tiny little brush: you can't really do anything. In the suburbs there are more possibilities and more freedom.

Interview by Anneke Bokern for City Visions Europe.