Through its recent urban sprawl, the city of Issoudun has grown more uniform and commonplace in its makeup, losing much of its geographical legibility. The creation of a new coherence is the goal of our landscape master plan. We explored two areas of research: how to approach and manage the limits between habitat and agriculture, and how to successfully transform the valleys crossing the city.

Along the city's perimeter, we discovered fragments of agricultural plots both amongst and beyond residential areas, constituting together a sort of “backstage” to the city. We proposed the purchase and gradual planting of these plots, in the image of the orchards that surrounded certain medieval cities in the past. These plots become a public space that punctuates here and there the housing estates, constituting together an area for promenades, all the while delineating a new shape and contour for the city and its future extensions.

The aim is not the invention of a green ring or a rampart for the city. These concentric and radiating, but also shifting, landscape lines, create a vegetative framework, a landscape structure able to accommodate new developments while providing quality to the existing residential area. The physical distribution of the thoroughfares and adjoining segments exceed the smaller scale of the individual house to form horizon lines shared by all the inhabitants.

Like a collection of natural mechanisms at work, we observe agricultural territories with all the functions, procedures, components that make them up. In designing a project, in modifying a territory, the “language” of the landscape itself is altered. This is not merely the conceiving of form, but of a process of transformation. Here again there are substitution mechanisms at work, aesthetically determining the “composition” of the landscape. Neither a restoration, nor a recovery, but a unique invention.