Renew the city from the inside – Liberation

From April 3 to 6, 2025 in Bordeaux, The quartus endowment fund for architecture Organizes a series of urban meetings, workshops and explorations on how to design and live in cities. An event that Release is a partner.

Between 1994 and 1997, when I studied in Geneva, staying was already a real challenge. For the past twenty years, militant groups claimed access to affordable housing and a right to live a collective project by occupying vacant buildings in a city where real estate speculation was very strong.

My housing research is quickly oriented towards a building recently occupied in Carouge. In this squat, I meet a group of a dozen inhabitants made up of students, craftsmen and artists. The building, dating from the end of the 19th century, had two levels with attic above a large commercial ground floor. At the rear, a passageway distributed the entire house made up of a dozen parts. We were installed as in a large house.

Before my arrival, the inhabitants had agreed in how to occupy the spaces: the large room in the first would be dedicated to the common space in which a shared kitchen would be installed, the rooms of variable size would be allocated according to the situation of couple or celibacy but also the need to work at home, a large common bathroom would complete the sinks present in each of the rooms …

Subsequently, regularly, we discussed the changes to the programming of « our » building. The commercial space on the ground floor was transformed into an associative restaurant, the unoccupied attic were adapted to a guest room to temporarily welcome people in precarious situations. Thus, the shared life project co-constructed for three years in the exchange around simple values ​​of sharing and definition of the commons while being attentive to the intimacy of each.

This collective experience, lived from the inside, has largely contributed to characterizing my professional career both within the academic framework of my teaching and in that of the Fagart & Fontana agency. Thanks to the demonstration of a possible collective life, squats have established a functional housing model for part of the population, inspiring housing cooperatives that are now a great success in Switzerland.

At a time when the challenges of the sustainable city encourage us to no longer destroy and explore the potential for adapting existing buildings, we are interested in changing the building, following a dynamic of continuity and reinvention, while questioning the social dimension. Define collectively programming, develop the rules of living together, explore the capacity of existing buildings to mutate and spatialize an ordinary architecture are all possible entries to rethink contemporary collective housing. Halls are no longer simple transit places, they become spaces for meeting and exchange. The corridors transform into interior streets, the stairs lit in places of sociability. The housing, far from the standards, offer many typologies adapted to the needs and residential routes of each: large shared apartments combining private and collective spaces, small autonomous apartments completed with shared and equipped spaces, etc.

By collectively exploring these project territories, we could help « renew the city from inside », a more generous, attentive and just city.