Reinventing Paris An interdisciplinary collaboration to imagine a radical building that meets new urban needs
The challenge
Paris needs new solutions to challenges touching namely housing, density, social mixing, energy and resilience. Aiming to tap into collective innovation, the mayor of Paris dedicates 23 sites to innovative projects in these fields.
The innovation
A building designed to supply needs in terms of housing, childcare, workspace, well-being, and short food-chain supply, while guaranteeing social and intergenerational mixing. The building would pioneer new levels of energy efficiency and be reproductible elsewhere. Wow!Labs joins an interdisciplinary team of 6 professionals hailing from architecture, service design, product design, ecology and urban planning to imagine the project; and if selected, make it a reality.
How far can civil society create the innovation it needs in the context of urban renewal? Can a municipality really co-create innovation with its inhabitants? What risks can local authorities take in materializing services and buildings designed by citizens? Do citizens really know how to answer their own needs? What methods, tools and knowledge can we tap into when looking for new answers to old problems? Can collective innovation work in practice, and if so, in what conditions and at what cost? What are the risks of involving users or a community in an innovation process? How can these risks be mitigated?
Sustainable architecture
How can cities be built more systemically? How far can the innovativeness of a building be measured by its prowesses? Is using a building 24/7 the key to energy use optimization? Can large-scale buildings really be energy neutral in a city? Is it more expensive to design a large-scale building ecologically, or not? What effort might a city make in order to achieve more innovative building processes? Do building regulations really hinder innovation in construction? Innovative use of buildings versus building regs: which is more efficient in actual energy reductions?
