In 2003, the city of London advanced their candidature to host the Olympic Games. The site is familiar: facing vis-à-vis with the Greenwich peninsula, a gigantic valley territory composed around a channeled tributary of the Thames. Located on the urban periphery, the area is one of abandoned industrial zones, vague plots of land, and gigantic pieces of infrastructure. The transformation of this territory provides above all the opportunity to redevelope what was previously a large tear in the city.

We proposed a park system based on the vestiges of the water system, connecting the abandoned areas in a continuum, and creating a landscape for the large flows of traffic. A network of cordons made from forested areas, meadows, marches, and water areas determines which islands are constructible and helps foster the redevelopment of the surrounding neighborhoods. The proposal, which allows for the welcoming of the Olympic Games on site, is relatively conventional.

What is not conventional, is the dimension of the intervention: transforming an “urban” territory that stretches ten kilometers in length. A surprising scale, as contemporary projects are usually of more modest dimension. Greenwich peninsula, for example, is four times smaller.

Nonetheless, in regards to the London periphery as a whole and its gigantic amount of sprawl, this landscape structure is but a beginning. Compared with the 19^th Century American projects for cities five times less populated, the structure is a minor one.

To us, the situation seems paradoxical: we weave formidable networks of highways and railways, yet we remain reluctant to provide the peripheries of our cities with suitable organization larger than the distance between two roundabouts. This process of “adaptation” to scale seems to us to be the major theoretical issue of territorial architecture.