Agrocité Gagarine includes a productive urban landscape

Last week, the newsletter of urbanNext reminded us of a productive city project that started on site in 2022 near Paris, France.

In their newsletter, urbanNext write: ‘In the heart of Ivry-sur-Seine (Val de Marne), the Agrocity Gagarine Truillot urban project is a paradigmatic example of urban regeneration in an area identified as priority by the National Agency for Urban Renewal… Within a peaceful neighborhood that favours pedestrian mobility, the project offers a city of proximity, united and appropriable. Public space and vegetation are an opportunity for social connection and create actual agricultural landscapes in dense urban areas.’

In 2021, the project was the winner of the Quartiers Fertiles [Fertile Urban Quarter] award, and its designers, French-Spanish architecture and urban design practice Archikubik, explain that the project proposes to work on 3 axes:
– an innovative methodology based on exploratory interviews, les « tu à tu », aimed at developing the urban quarter’s reference plan with all inhabitants;
– the circular and solidarity economy, les m2 intelligents, bringing together concepts of reuse, reversibility of use, innovative typologies of lifestyles, air quality, water cycle;
– la ville productive [the productive city], aiming for an edible city with professionalized urban agriculture in the heart of the block.

The terminology for these types of urban development or regeneration may still not be fixed –  Fertile Urban Quarter, Edible City, Productive Cities – are all mentioned in relation to this project, but, internationally, there seems to emerge a typology, and, similar to Bohn&Viljoen’s contribution to the productive city designs for PHV Heidelberg in 2016, Agrocité Gagarine Truillot proposes urban agriculture sites ‘on all the roofs, on terraces and in greenhouses on buildings, located along the railways and on certain work and recreation sites’.

And, similar to Bohn&Viljoen’s contribution to the urban regeneration project Urbane Agrikultur in Köln-Ehrenfeld (2010-13), work on Agrocité Gagarine Truillot also started in 2021 with the installation of a temporary orchard which houses some of the trees of the future district.

More information about Agrocité Gagarine Truillot can be found here.

Information about Archikubik is here.

For more information on our contribution to Urbane Agrikultur Köln-Ehrenfeld see here.

Image: In 1962, Cité Gagarine, a symbol of progress in workers’ housing, was inaugurated. In 2020, an Agrocité co-constructed with the inhabitants is beginning to be set up. (source: Archikubik www, 2022)