Infrastructural building culture: Passage-Paysages

Project description

Infrastructure is the backbone of building culture. Roads and paths are the most important public spaces. Today, the car still dominates the road space, restricting its potential. Reducing motorised traffic offers Swiss cities the opportunity to reclaim their streets for public use. In collaboration with interest groups and residents in Geneva, Lausanne-West and Fribourg, the project is developing scenarios for transforming cantonal roads in an urban context into green infrastructures for active mobility, thereby integrating building culture with the social and ecological transformation of cities.

Background

Alongside motorways, cantonal roads form the most important part of the Swiss road network. When these roads pass through towns (routes cantonales en traversée de localité), they become structural axes, connecting city centres with the periphery, promoting densification, and serving as a cultural and physical backbone in the urban landscape. As they are designed for car traffic, they currently function primarily as corridors for motorised vehicles, with negative effects on all other road users (pedestrians, cyclists, micro-scooters, etc.), dividing communities and creating disorderly urban spaces. This also makes them an effective lever for promoting sustainable mobility, healthy lifestyles and dynamic urban spaces. In interdisciplinary collaboration, specialist fields such as architecture, urban planning, geography and history work together with anthropology, environmental technology, politics, local authorities, communities and interest groups.

Project implementation

Cantonal roads involve many stakeholders. A co-design method, known as the contributive approach, brings everyone together to integrate interdisciplinary knowledge through dialogue. This creates shared visions for urban spaces that are socially and environmentally sustainable. Surveys help assess user experiences with building culture and incorporate them into future designs. To develop concrete ideas for Geneva, Lausanne West and Fribourg, work will be carried out in each of these cities for one year. In workshops with designers, researchers, interest groups and citizens, areas are mapped, transformations outlined, and innovative scenarios, including prototypes, are designed.