R-Urban

Author: Lee Ortenberg

Short Summary

R-Urban was an initiative started by the residents of Colombes, France in cooperation with Atelier d’architecture Autogérée to create urban networks, flows, and circuits that emphasized local production/consumption and ecological sustainability. Their aim was to engage residents in eco-civic practices of collaboration and management to build urban resilience and regeneration. The pilot project in Colombes was composed of three parts: AgroCite, RecyLab, and EcoHab, which introduced urban farming, a culture of mending, reusing, and repurposing, and co-housing space that actively facilitated cooperation, to the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, R-Urban is no longer in operation. R-Urban lost their property and project to a shift in leadership at the municipal level. Years of their hard work and international support were erased due to a municipal decision to change the property their project sat on into a car park.

Website address: http://r-urban.net/

Location: Colombes, Paris, France

Logo. source

Profile

R-Urban’s primary purpose was to create a network of, and space for, local production and consumption. The idea is a socioeconomic model that shifts power relations back to citizens through a culture of co-production. The project allows for the exploration and implementation of ecologically mindful solutions to build urban resilience by empowering civilians to create and run facilities addressing regeneration in the fields of housing, economy, agriculture, culture, and arts. This project was started by the people, built by the people, all for the people. Residents collaborated to create workshops and initiatives to design and build their spaces and systems, thereby contributing to a more ecologically sound environment for themselves and for other beings and cycles.

The project began at a local, neighborhood level, and aimed to progressively scale to the city and, ideally, regional level. The city of Colombes, where R-Urban ran their pilot project, has 84,000 residents and encourages anyone and everyone to get involved however they can. It is important to note that while Colombes does not have a steady economy, and deals with high unemployment rates, they do already hold a culture of community, collaboration, and shared spaces in their urban context.

The R-Urban project aimed not only for a physical transformation of the urban context, but also the social, political, and economic transformation and emancipation that would come with it for all the people living and participating in these spaces:

“The R-Urban strategy is not relegating economic responsibility to citizens because the state is unable or unwilling to assume it any longer, but claims the social and political right to question the state’s power in terms of its role and responsibility . . . [I]n this case, the citizens’ right to the city does not only mean the right to occupy space in it, but also means to decide how it is developed, managed and used.” (source)

The project’s first phase consisted of three main components: urban agriculture; creating a culture of mending, reusing, and recycling; and co-housing. These components were housed and expanded upon through AgroCite, RecyLab, and EcoHab, where civilians had the space, tools, resources, and knowledge to design and build resilient, regenerative urban solutions and innovations. These spaces were meant to be used by the community for the betterment of the community, allowing individuals to explore and collaborate in alternative models and frameworks to what the market-state system currently offers.

They aimed to grow in succession by investing in temporary spaces where they could experiment and create for future urban development, essentially creating relevant case studies for local authorities to go by. While temporary space did allow for flexibility and variation in design, it is also what led to R-Urban’s downfall when they lost in a legal battle to the local municipality, who took the land R-Urban had been working on and transformed it into a car park, eliminating years of hard work. It quickly became clear that acquiring and retaining land was a big challenge for this sort of initiative.

"Community gardens at Agrocité—an agro-cultural unit within the R-Urban network in Colombes, June 2013." source

Governance

R-Urban utilized a bottom-up strategy by integrating architects and planners from Atelier d’architecture Autogérée as initiators, facilitators, mediators, and consultants for civilians to initiate their own projects to create a network of resident-run facilities. A diversity of actors were involved, from residents to local government and public organizations, although further information is unclear. Collective facilities were meant to grow in number, managed by a cooperative land trust that would acquire space, facilitate development, and guarantee democratic governance–although exactly how this would be done was not laid out.

YOUTUBE v9vUnWsKboQ This video contains "testimonies of different actors involved in implementing the [R-Urban] strategy-architects, researchers, local organisations, residents, political representatives, institutions-and gives an indication on the impact generated by the project within local communities and beyond.

Projects

  • AgroCité: Consisted of a micro-experimental farm, community gardens, educational and cultural spaces and tools for energy production, composting and rainwater recycling, also for collective knowledge in seed keeping/sharing
    • AnimaLab: A microstructure within AgroCité - beehives and chicken coop to be integrated into the flow
  • RecyLab: A platform for recycling, reusing, and eco-building; workshops and space/tools for collecting/depositing resources (aka ‘waste’), facilitating a new culture more mindful of our discard processes
  • ECoHab: A mix of social housing, cohousing and cooperative, residential, artist residency, researchers, students; built through a mix of self-construction and on-site workshops

Friends & Partners

  • EU Life Programme
  • Cooperative and Social Bank NEF and NEF Gestion
  • Public Works Group (for London projects)
  • City of Colombes / Hauts-de-Seine
  • Île-de-France
  • Before the project died out, there were attempts at creating a larger network with Belgium, Spain, Romania, and Germany

Finances

Funding seems to have come solely from the EU Life Programme, which seems unsustainable in the economic system we currently have. However, one of the aims of R-Urban was to create more value in social enterprise to rely less on a financial structure of survival, so perhaps in this sense, generating income is less relevant and their dependence on funding makes sense.

Origin Story

R-Urban began as an open-source project focused on creating tools and space for residents to actively engage in changing their city and how they interact with it in their ways of living. It was a small-scale, local initiative that came as a response to the challenges we face as a global community as climate change intensifies, and as a response to the lack of action and incredibly slow pace of government initiatives in creating resilient and regenerative city spaces.

A diagram of the R-Urban resilience strategy ("micro-urbanism, civic agencies, locally closed cycles") source

See Also

Sources