Lille Hellemmes Esquisse Internationale
Sunday 10 - Saturday 16 February 2013
The project:
This is a live project to a brief set by the Direction d’Urbanisme de Ville de Lille with presentations to the City Planners and Counsellors. The brief is to prepare a community plan a part of Hellemmes east of the city centre. This is late nineteenth century workers terrace housing, built around the Fives Cail Bibcock (FCB) factories, Fives Lille-Cail was a steam locomotive and heavy metal company which also specialized in sugar making factories, now it is part of the Fives Group. Their factories were centred east of Lille and finally closed in 2001.
The main factory site of over 100ha is on the west of our area and was the subject of a major design competition in 2007 which is now being implemented. We are dealing with smaller sites and with the neighborhood of terrace housing and people’s home around smaller post-industrial sites. To the south is the SNCF’s 25 ha TGV heavy repair depot or technicentre d’Hellemmes with 1000 employees. We should explore links to the south of here and also ways of linking to the city centre.
Nowadays Lille is a major metropolis with a population of 226,000 and is capital of Region du Nord with Greater Lille having a population of more than 1.2 million, It is 20km to the Belgian border (the Dutch name is Rijsel) and Lille’s hinterland extends well into Flanders. It is 92km from Brussels. Formerly an area of coal mining and heavy industry and also textiles it is now very much a service centre. Like many northern English towns it has suffered from the decline of mining and industry and is in the process of reinventing itself as a service, administrative, hi-tech and design industry centre. It was European Capital of Culture in 2004. It has been at the forefront of European cities reinventing themselves,
Facilitators
Robert Holden
Jamie Liversedge
Findlay Ross
Armelle Varcin
- Participants
- 22 students from the University of Greenwich (UofG)
- 14 students from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture et de Paysage de Lille (ENSAP)
