Towards an Atlas of the transition: exploring representations of territorial habitability

© Noélie Lecoanet, Enoncé théorique EPFL, Prof. P. Viganò, T. Pietropolli, 2019

Noélie Lecoanet

Supervisor: Paola Viganò, Lab-U

Start date: May 2021. Defense date (expected): May 2025

 

Abstract 

“On ne sait plus ce que c’est qu’habiter, on ne sait même plus ce que c’est qu’un espace habitable. Quand je veux expliquer cette faillite de l’urbanisme, j’avoue que j’hésite encore. Je ne sais pas quelles sont les causes essentielles. Je crois qu’elles sont tellement multiples qu’on a une certaine peine à les analyser. Et cette perte de l’idée, ou de la représentation, de l’espace habitable, de l’espace habité, de l’espace qui est l’œuvre d’une activité humaine aussi importante que le jeu, le rire, l’amour, le travail, et qui est l’habiter… et bien la disparition de cette perception à mon avis, fait partie des symptômes qui à la fois paralysent la connaissance, et l’imagination.” – Henri Lefebvre, 1972
 

Towards an Atlas of the Transition explores the potential of representations to interrogate territorial habitability. Shaking up our gaze, contemporaneity is marked by an incessant complexity: the expression of the territory and its project are challenged by uncertainty. Looking to conceive, drawing to project, the architect-urbanist models space through its representation, accompanying societies in their quest for inhabitation, their being in the world. From now on critical, the habitability as a set of factors, aspires to the control of the world by the technical mastery. This parametric rigidity reveals an anthropocentric vision of the spaces of life to the project of a subject: the Human. Moving away from its origin as the aspiration to a world for tomorrow, the appearance of paradoxical conditions in living spaces testify to the denial of the socio-ecological transition. The research states then the hypothesis of a potential cohabitability, far from a destructive being in the world. This new look requires a systemic understanding of living today to question the how? of a livability tomorrow, reimagining our tools of representations and assemblies, to express welcoming territories all alive. How to reverse the gaze, and its expression, from habitability to cohabitability? The thesis explores the Atlas as a methodological tool to describe the possibilities of an inclusive habitability. Focusing on the Leman lake area, gathering knowledge through visualization as a manual of the gaze, a narrative of the inhabitation for tomorrow will be proposed.

 
 
Key words: Atlas / Habitability / Territory / Représentation / Cartography / Narrative / Iconography / Leman