Within the larger, multidisciplinary consultation headed by Jean Nouvel for the Grand Paris (Greater Paris) project, our study developed a proposal for the renewal and conversion of eight hundred kilometers of edge areas bordering the Parisian agglomeration. Little of quality can be found today along these edges, which are most often marked by simple fencing separating residential housing from extensive agriculture.

These two worlds should rather link up together through the intervention of a unique environment. One which reconciles them, renders their relationship mutual. The thin and fragile line separating them should be widened, imbuing it with a thickness and existence in which each world can benefit from the other, utilize the qualities of the other. This environment should both make use of practices and techniques borrowed from the world of agriculture, as well as compensate for the deficiencies present in the urban periphery. The first requirement bringing to mind orchards, vegetable gardens, truck and marsh farming, while the second calling for public pathways and practices. It is less a matter of creating a utopian and picturesque “beautiful countryside”, than of making up for practices and usages lacking in each of these two worlds.

Putting it into place requires governance. An “edge law” should be conceived based on the 2005 law which aimed at the protection of peri-urban agricultural and natural areas, modeled in turn on the 1986 French Coastal law. What it amounts to is the creation of a policy accompanied by its physical results. These results are determined by the invention of a landscape which will be at the same time continuous and very diverse, a hem offering new horizons.

Facing the city, it marks an opening and the end of a boundary. Public as it is, it establishes connections, allows the end of camp logic. Its simple existence has profound effects. Dead end streets lead to shared spaces, altering completely their status of public streets with private usage.

Facing the countryside, the same type of expansion applied at the boundary between two private estates without paths, creates a vital network allowing accessibility to these “urban fields”, multiplying the opportunities for invention.

The instruments are thus simple and few. They could be quickly put into place. The opportunity is there. The results would be enormous, if one considers the extent of these border edges.