Urban Imaginaries and Landscapes Motorway
Résumé
Motorway infrastructure has arrived in the Bordeaux landscape in the
late 1960s. It then followed and formed an imaginary and a planning
thought of economic and commercial development (Harvey & Knox,
2012). The former marshes in the north of the city gradually gave way
to large-scale buildings and wide carriageways - in other words, urban
forms and a territory of the automobile and automobility, with the
motorway as its backbone. Until the 1990s, the few morphological
evolutions of the motorway were linked to public policies of
commercial development and to technical engineering logics of traffic
fluidity and safety (in particular, transformations and additions of
interchanges as close as possible to shops).
Since the 2000s, urban renewal projects have been underway in
neighboring districts. The monofunctional commercial space is
now inside the city and becoming the focus of new urban thinking
too. The aim is to rebuild the city upon the city in line with public
policies for ecological transition (planting trees, mixing uses, mobility
diversification), and to create a new associated imaginary. The mutation
or even disappearance of the motorway of the late 1960s becomes a
subject of urban planning to create a new landscape at the entrance
to the city.
How do imaginaries and their translation into urban planning
crystallize within a motorway morphology and modify it?
We propose to study the Bordeaux case from the science and
technology studies, motorway infrastructure and territory evolve as
a coherent whole according to structuring orientations forged by
interaction of knowledge, norms or collective imaginaries (Bulkeley
et al., 2014). We propose an analysis of urban and motorway forms
using graphic illustration such as aerial photography or master planning
schemes to understand the material translations of planning thought
(Söderström, 2000).