Rythmologie d’un hyper-lieu. Le cas du Montreux Jazz festival

Luca Pattaroni (LaSUR, EPFL), Lucien Delley (LaSUR, EPFL), Thibault Romany (LaSUR, EPFL), Alexandre Alahi (VITA, EPFL), Dario Negueruela (ALICE, EPFL)

Even if they have accompanied the whole history of cities, major public events have acquired in recent decades an increasingly important dimension in the development and attractiveness of urban centres. During their unfolding, these events induce major reconfigurations of urban forms, whether in the use of buildings and public spaces, flows or even individual and collective behavior. Their resonance however often extends beyond the time of their performance through the constitution of various traces, institutional, memorial and spatial. In the case of a festival like that of Montreux, which is at the heart of the project, the destiny of the city has gradually merged – symbolically and spatially with that of the event. With each rehearsal, the sphere of influence of the festival extends over the city, through new constructions, but also by the expansion of the regions of the city affected by the influx of visitors and the multiplication of stages. These questions do not arise only for major events, but they concern all situations where infrastructures and urban spaces have to contend with significant variations in attendance and densities, whether ski resorts, large spaces audiences sized on the scale of a weekly market or the occasional reception of an international fair. These challenges call for an interdisciplinary work of description and modeling aiming to articulate the multiplication of urban rhythms – individual and collective – and the spatial and social development of the city. This articulation relates as much to the micro and macro dynamics of human flows as to the systems for spatial management of public events or even the evolution of accommodation policies.