Caen's industrial peninsula is undergoing a rapid metamorphosis. These transformations are the subject of numerous and significant urban studies carried out by MVRDV. At the end of the peninsula, “the Island of Caen” detaches itself. It is a twelve-hectare territory in the heart of the city center, where large public facilities are built, the library completed by OMA being the most emblematic of these elements.

The challenge of this development project lies in the creation of lasting, structuring, and immediately attractive public spaces. There are around five hectares of public space to be designed and formed within a limited timeframe. They will serve in future as references for the peninsula's territory as a whole.

Creating a purpose, creating new practices, strengthening those already in use, are indispensable prerequisites for the development of the centrality of the site. The presence of water along with the memory of flooded prairies, feeds the desire of imparting and bringing into stronger relief a certain natural geography in the city center.

Nevertheless, an industrial past, still present in the form of quays and large scale buildings, results in having to balance two different and particular faces of the site. There exists a real force in the already present architecture that demands a rigorous composition of its public spaces. And this is one of the major characteristics of the project: the introduction of plant life, in connection with the water, that succeeds in playing with the excessiveness and the powerful beauty of the industrial traces, treating them like contemporary works of architecture.