Co-Designing the Urban Surface as Socio-Ecological Interface in the Adaptation of Fribourg’s Cantonal Roads into Multimodal Passage-Paysages
In recent decades, the concept of the urban surface has emerged as a crucial element in transforming public spaces worldwide. Foundational projects like Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette in Paris and more recent interventions, such as those by the Belgian office Artgineering with their notable motto “road space is public space,” highlight this evolution. In Fribourg, a significant portion of the city’s public space is allocated to cantonal roads, many of which fail to function effectively as either roads or streets. In Switzerland, cantonal roads have historically connected city centers with their peripheries, recently becoming the structural backbones of urban densification projects. However, this extensive road network has a profound impact on the environment. It contributes to soil sealing, which disrupts rainwater infiltration, affects the local microclimate, and poses a threat to regional biodiversity. As a result, the urban surface serves a dual role: it acts as an interface between the soil and the natural rhythms of the territory, while also offering opportunities to reprogram spaces for new sociocultural uses that promote healthier lifestyles.
The use of systemic approaches like Green Infrastructures (GI) as Nature Based Solutions (NBS) to adapt these cantonal roads can intensify the benefits of this shift. NBS require transdisciplinary co-production strategies incorporating interdisciplinary researchers, users, stakeholders, and more-than-human entities—like soils and plants—as active agents in processes of urban transformation. This project will develop a co-design toolkit and methodology which engages the urban surface as socioecological interface to optimize NBS benefits and create systemic, interdisciplinary, and adaptive green infrastructures building on previous work by the EPFL laboratories, ALICE and CHANGE. Since 2019, ALICE has been working on the notion of Passage-Paysage to adapt cantonal roads in Switzerland into multimodal green infrastructures for active mobility and other public uses. Meanwhile, CHANGE has been working on quantifying the effects of soil and vegetation features on soil infiltration processes and land-atmosphere interactions. In collaboration with public authorities in Fribourg the project will deliver a replicable co-design methodology and toolkit with a special focus on ecosystem services assessment, along with a catalog of future scenarios adapting a main cantonal road axis into a passage-paysage with implementation policies and guidelines.
General information
Project Lead: Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, Sara Bonetti
Project Team: Francesca BASSANI, Julien HEIL, Antoine FOEHRENBACHER, Raul HANSRA SARTORIUS
Fribourg Partners:
Etat de Fribourg, Service de la mobilité,
Ville de Fribourg, Service d’urbanisme et d’architecture