FOUM EL OUED TECHNOPOLE

AN ECO-CITY Of THE DESERT

A sustainable city is not an ideal city!

It is not a mental construct based on ideology or on the techniques of a given point in time, whatever their virtues might be.

Unlike the principles of the functionalist period, it stems from systemic thinking.

Much data needs to be cross-referenced, hierarchies established and choices made for the future that can be controlled today.

And one golden rule needs to be followed: any system, if it is to have a chance of survival, must integrate into its design its own corrective principles (which, incidentally, is a rule that should hold for regulatory systems, which were not designed with this approach in mind!)

We have made this “agility” of design into a working method that is suited to issues raised by complex projects. Initially, these projects involved the reconquering of industrial spaces. Today the question of the environment, for us, is what underpins this “dynamics of assembly.”

The city of El Laâyoune that is to be invented is also an exceptional city due to its situation and climate, which will give rise to orientations, shapes and concepts that are out of the ordinary.

The fact that this city of the sands is built from and around a great university is also an issue and an opportunity.

The conditions for the creation of an urban laboratory exist, in the tradition of the Casablanca of 1917.

By associating the specificities of a site and of a period, it is possible to place at the core of the project the notion of prototype spaces that associate research and innovation with the construction of spaces for exchange and social life that are appropriate to today’s expectations.

A city is designed first and foremost for the men and women who will live there. But today another narrative impacts the practice of urban planning. Whereas in the 1970s space changed more than society did, we have now entered an inverted cycle, in a tendency that affects all the world’s countries: today it is society that is evolving more rapidly than space.

In our digital society an “urbanism of lifestyles” has been added to the planning of urban spaces. This is the new reality that must be reflected in an urban project.

The El Laâyoune technology hub, by its nature, its location and the time frames in which it will be created, can embody these values.

Bernard Reichen