La Ville Foret
Grenoble, FR
Location: Grenoble, FR
Year: 2000
Site: 14 ha
Program: Housing, Parking
Client: City of Grenoble and Europan
Associates: Studio Engleback, Tunbridge Wells
Engineer: Battle McCarthy, Consulting Engineers
Urban Forest is an attempt to “grow” a city—an urban ecology organised around seven guiding principles that together produce critical density. The proposal sets out criteria for accommodating forecast urban growth in cities such as Grenoble, which in Europe’s mobile economy must compete for both talent and enterprise. Rather than expanding outward, Urban Forest claims the vertical dimension as a new urban frontier, increasing the size of the city from the ground up. The project builds on the post-industrial character of its site and treats density not as an end in itself, but as the condition for a richer mix of housing, services and public life. By linking spatial structure to ecological performance, the concept aims to deliver a resilient, liveable model for the 21st century city. The strategy combines two movements: vertical housing and a fine-grained colonisation of the ground
. Housing is addressed through a marked diversity of typologies and the stacking of related needs—parking, collective gardens and leisure/work programme—not in a single megastructure, but distributed across multiple tall buildings. This multiplication of towers avoids monotony and enables a more adaptable response to a diversified housing market, creating variety in orientation, outlook, access and community scale. At street level, the project proposes an active, walkable ground plane that can host dense and diverse programmes, anchored by public and semi-private gardens that generate the conditions for everyday urban life. In this way, Urban Forest treats the city as a layered ecosystem: an inhabitable landscape where built form, mobility and shared green space reinforce one another, producing both intensity and comfor
