Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

All over Europe industrial practices are shutting down,
presenting the designers and managers of our cities with the
task of reprogramming them to other uses. In most cases, this
is done by tearing down the old structures and building up
completely new urban districts. Although, in the reprogramming
of the post-industrial island Ile de Nantes, the designer
Alexandre Chemetoff and his design team employed another
approach: refining instead of replacing. The team transformed
the island in an inclusive, open-ended process of incremental
development, and the design approach gave rise to site-specific,
sustainable design, praised by several contemporary scholars
and practitioners.
This thesis aims to present the reader with an alternative
to the generic way for designing post-industrial landscapes
by investigating the Ile de Nantes (IdN) project. The author
attempts to translate the design approach used into a more
general framework and test its transferability in a case study.
The result consists of a framed version of the IdN design
approach in the form of Guidelines for IdN Inspired Post-
Industrial Transformation, and a case study in Skromberga
Industry in Ekeby, Bjuv municipality. The case study partly proves
the Guidelines transferability, as it results in a thrifty design
proposal for how to initiate a transformation process in the
derelict industry of Skromberga, deemed realistic by all parties
of interest included.
The study shows that designing in an IdN inspired manner
can be a key to more economically, ecologically and socially
sustainable landscape architecture. This thesis presents one way
for channelizing the IdN design approach, and acknowledges
that it takes dedication, collaboration, creativity, effort and time
to employ it.