Reinventing
Paris

Les collines de Bercy-Charenton: a mixed program combining logistics, student residences and sports, organized in layers and acting as an urban connector.

One of the challenges of the urban project is to recompose a "metropolitan place", to redefine its identity through its topography - a way of positively confronting the nuisances of the contemporary city, to consider it as a rich and attractive entity through the mix of functions and uses planned, to configure it in reference to a "temporal" dimension, a memory and a future.

The imposing scale of the rail-connected urban logistics building (approx. 200 m x 50 m) is a superb foundation, a vast pedestal of over one hectare, located at the height of boulevard Poniatowski and rising some 8 m above the railway line on the ring road side.

This large-scale element is conceived as an "urban connection" enabling the development of a more ambitious "living quarter" project on the surface. To transform this site into the first piece of a future metropolitan district, the project proposes :

• identify its position as an "urban threshold", as the field of a future project emblematic of the Greater Paris Metropolis (although currently without urbanity), considering it in its cardinal north-south orientation as an element of "urban transition", a sort of taut urban connector between Bercy and Charenton;
• to organize it as a large-scale "new landscape" by creating a unique "green topography" that offers a new reference ground, highly visible from the outlying districts, future high-rise buildings and users of the ring road: an address that must be an environmental, urban and landscape signal;
• consolidate its strategic role as a future urban logistics hub for the metropolis, by developing several modes of transport from road, rail, streetcar and soft modes;
• to provide a variety of community-oriented programming to make it more attractive;
• to configure contrasting built volumes, following a north-south strip system in relation to the new landscape, with a high punctuation on boulevard Poniatowski, and a rather low linearity on rue Logistique. These volumes, which border or edge a new landscape, are scaled to the scale of this large site, in reference to those of the military heritage of the Bercy bastion or the imposing retaining walls of the railway buildings.
• include this environmental piece in the succession of nearby green spaces (Bois de Vincennes, Charenton cemetery, petite ceinture, Parc de Bercy) to reinforce the "Green Plan for the Paris Region" that the local authorities want to consolidate as of 2017.