International Competition: Intercommunal Territories and Small Towns

Public services, shops and jobs are found in the centres of small towns of less than 20,000 habitants and large villages for reasons connected with the history of urban development and town planning.
Small towns and village communities, where there is a strong potential for the quality-of-life with nature and national heritage, are areas where town planning and rurality can combine, respecting ecological constraints. Sustainable development in these territories will provide an alternative to the urban concentrations in large built-up areas’
Please note : Territories and project sites located in large built-up areas can be introduced in a proposal…

The purpose of these developments is to improve the quality and the attractiveness of the living environment in interurban areas. For example “a town centre” connected by “eco-friendly transport” to a ‘public square’ and to a ‘park’ … served by an intercommunal transport network provides an answer to these concerns. Based on these existing situations, any improvements made to the quality of life will highlight:

• That conditions of access to the urban centres are specific to each territory (i,e, coastline, mountain, plain, large built-up areas) and take into account the location of centres for employment, services and public amenities
• The use of new means of transport aiming to reduce or replace the use of the individual car
• Easy and safe use of the urban centre and its environment by ‘everyone’.

Quality of life will be evaluated using the three criteria in the ‘Referential for the quality of life’ with priority given to the respecting references below :

• architectural quality: improvements to facilitate access to public buildings and areas
• quality of community life : possibility of easier access to the urban centre for everyone
• respect of the environment : savings in parking areas and energy could be made, depending on the means of transport used.

The 2009-2010 discussion topic for the “Robert Auzelle seminar” is common to the national prize for elected representatives and professionals and the international competition for academics from all disciplines. The French ’eco-friendly transport’ vocabulary sheet for urban art along with other vocabulary sheets is a referential teaching aid.

Competition Brief in English (PDF)