Grand Paris Métropole Douce

Grand Paris was a Masters level design studio at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. The project involved a week-long excursion to the site in suburban Paris, documentation and extrapolation of site from research. This culminated in an intervention proposal.

Grand Paris Métropole Douce is a vision for the development of the metropolitan region of Paris as well as a model for a prosperous and ecologically balanced metropolis for the 21st century.

In 2008, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy initiated an international consultation, Le Grand Paris, where ten multidiciplinary teams were asked to imagine the transformation of Greater Paris into a pioneering urban landscape evolving in accordance with the demands of the Kyoto Protocol. LIN worked together with experts in urban planning, urban theory and history, philosophy, architecture, ecology, climate change, mobility, and culture in a distributed temporary laboratory, collaborating with research institutes at MIT, the Oldenburg University and the TU Berlin.

Grand Paris Métropole Douce takes an optimistic position: urban change does not only happen – driven by complex systems and stuctures – it can also be tackled, discussed, influenced, re-directed... It is an attempt to think about the urban phenomenon in all its dimensions at the same time: social, economical, ecological cultural... It is not a finished project: it defines a multitude of steps, a transformation process for the upcoming decades.