The aim of my thesis is to provide urban architects and planners with working theoretical elements territorial project of the living. The living and the socio-ecological transition are key concepts in the nature and people paradigm, which asserts a human-nature relationship based on interdependence and co-evolution. Including the territorial project (both a research object and an operational tool for urban planning) in this new narrative means taking it on as a framework for co-design between ecology and urbanism, taking this interdisciplinarity built around the notion of continuity a step further, particularly through the concept and tool of ecological networks (EN). My thesis contributes to this progress with the aim of identifying three conditions of conceptualization and implementation that enable ecological networks to fit into this paradigm, constituting the three axes of my research based on two study areas, the Pays de Rennes and Greater Geneva:
- The first condition investigated is the co-design of ecological and urban continuities: one deals with non-human movements hindered by human settlements, the other guarantees the accessibility of public spaces and facilities. The hybrid nature of these continuities means that all species use the same network, although some avoid humans; a phenomenon that can be accentuated by the addition of other functions that increase human activity. Project research in Greater Geneva has enabled us to develop the continuity of the living as a concept and method of cartographic analysis, based on the co-design of spaces for human and non-human mobility, with the aim of organizing the proximity between species, from their meeting to their distancing, throughout the territory.
- In this perspective, the process of implementing ENs through the territorial project based on mapping them with a view to their land registration, or even the creation of some of these corridors, needs to be updated. To go beyond the integration of one tool into another requires the establishment of a prospective approach based on the co-design of the ENs and the territorial project based on a process of co-evolution of the living. The approach explored here is inspired by the landscape revitalization project, founded on the ecological and cultural regeneration of the landscape through a process of establishing the conditions for its intrinsic regeneration. Placing landscape revitalization at the heart of the territorial project will be the focus of the field study in the Pays de Rennes.
- The integration of agricultural space and its practices is necessary in order to establish an efficient urbanistic project beyond the urban context, across the whole territory, as well as to meet the challenges of implementing the ENs. The aim here is to explain how a project-based process that links agricultural practices, the food system, ecology, landscape and territory can revitalize the agricultural landscape according to its intrinsic logic. Research by design links the relocation of the food system and the revitalization of the agricultural landscape within the updated concept of terroir. Because implementing a terroir project means first and foremost revealing its potential existence, a tool is being developed in the Mandement (a Geneva inter-municipality) to put together a narrative of views, studies and projects: l'atlas du terroir.