Frédéric Ségur
After a university training in biology, ecology and genetics, and then in forestry at the National School of Rural Engineering, Water and Forestry, Frédéric Ségur chose to specialize his work on the concept of "urban forestry". He is now Director of the Lyon Canopy Plan and of the urban planting department.
“ A Canopy Plan to reduce urban heat islands. ”
“ A Canopy Plan to reduce urban heat islands. ”
Nature-based solutions
Frédéric Ségur is the head of the Landscape and Urban Forestry department at Lyon metropolis. There, he is in charge of the Plan Canopée, and ensures that policy actions related to water, plants, and climate are aligned. He alerts us to the fact that we must reclaim the lost knowledge of urban plantations and tree care. READ THE TRANSCRIPT
In Search of Nature-Based Solutions
Increasing the place of plants in cities plays a key role in mitigating the urban heat island effect, but trees must be addressed as a systemic issue, interfacing with the air, the ground, and water. For Frédéric Ségur, we must re-engage with the knowledge of urban forestry in order to regain our intelligence of trees and counter the mistaken assumptions on their life expectancy in urban settings. Beyond political declarations, the idea is to plant well rather than simply a lot, and to provide adequate conditions for them to develop—including space and living soil—and to take into account the ecotypes, but also to get the plant palette to change in relation to climate change.
Training Citizen Architects to Serve a Community
Designing an inclusive city implies involving their residents in urban projects, but what is the role of architects and urban planners in this process? For Andrew Freear, the head of the Rural Studio program, they both have the ethical responsibility of getting locally involved via concrete projects. Architectural schools must thus take on training citizen architects by engaging them in learning by doing, and thus have them redevelop a deep connection with context and places, acting as neighbors and activists within communities in order to collectively carry out experimental projects that tangibly improve society and the environment.
Collaborating with situations
The two Lebanese artists and filmmakers were awarded the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Award for Unconformities, a project currently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This artwork, like their approach, is based on a methodology of investigation and excavation and aims to offer another reading of history and the traces of the past.
Design: Reparation
Nicolas Nova is a social anthropologist. Inspired by New Media Studies and design fiction, he contends that the future of design lies in recycling and reparation as well as reinventing forms and functions. Did you know that a used flip-flop could serve as a lighter?
From "Mediance" to Places
The geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque revisits the polysemic dimension of the term “milieu,” and explains the distinction made by mesology—“the area of biology that deals with the relationships between the environments and organisms”—between “environment” and “milieu.” The reality of things differs depending on the environment of each species or culture, the object doesn’t exist in itself but according to its relationship with the subject. In this way, mesology goes much further than the subject/object dualism of modern science. Ontologically “trajective,” the environment is neither objective nor subjective, but firmly between the two theoretical subject/object centers. Berque takes the term “mediance,” meaning the dynamic coupling of the individual and their surroundings, from the Japanese “fūdo,” to which he adds “trajection,” a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its concrete surroundings. Taken as a whole, all human environments, distinct from the biosphere through their eco-techno-symbolic dimension, form the ecumene. For architecture, this implies a respect for history and the environment, without mimicking ancient forms, creating from the “mediance” of each place.
An Attempt to Drain Places
Larissa Fassler is a “Neo-Situationist” artist. By exploring places over the course of many hours, she gleans their ephemeral essence, which she then superimposes on the fixed urban master plan. The subjective maps thus generated highlight both urban narratives and history.
Maximizing reuse, minimizing transformation
Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.
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