Social Life of Campus Public Spaces

Experimental study on the role of temporary interventions in fostering social activity at Avenue Piccard, on the EPFL campus.

With more than 17,000 users and inhabitants, the EPFL Lausanne campus constitutes a main urban piece of the West-Lausanne agglomeration. This exploratory project contributes to the Campus piéton initiative, which proposes a greener, more user-friendly campus, better adapted to climate change.

Avenue Piccard currently serves as a major thoroughfare. Despite large numbers of people passing through it daily, it fails to foster social activities such as slow walking, long conversations, engaging with the surroundings. In short, it is an underutilized public space. Based on urban sustainability theory, we hypothesize that temporary infrastructure can play an important role in the transformation of ‘social life’ at Avenue Piccard, contributing to the regeneration of underutilized spaces. Temporary infrastructure can be modular, multifunctional and adaptable: it aligns with the values of circular urbanism.

This study aims to build on theory from urban sociology, circular economy and machine learning. We will experiment with temporary green infrastructure to understand its role in activating social life in public spaces. Pragmatically, our research will use object-tracking technologies to gather data on the usage of public spaces, and measure intensity of social activities (e.g. sitting, walking, talking). We will then place temporary interventions (chairs, tables, benches) to see if they impact how and where people move. We will combine data on social activities with environmental data, such as hourly weather, light intensity and ground moisture to get a holistic view of the effects of our interventions. We are interested in understanding the relationship between people, the temporary interventions, and the existing green infrastructure.

The experiment builds on the HERUS lab’s research into urban sustainability. With our initiative, we want to contribute to the quality of our shared campus and promote stewardship of campus public spaces through the use of modular, multifunctional and adaptable interventions.

I am contributing to this research with my doctoral project under the supervision of Prof. Claudia Binder.

I am contributing to this research with my doctoral project –Urban digital twins– under the supervision of Prof. Claudia Binder and Dr. Aristide Athanassiadis.