The ambiances are the message: Transects, project, and urban situations
Résumé
For geographers, the term transect designates “a field observation device or the representation of a space, along a linear path and in the vertical dimension, intended to identify a superposition, a spatial succession or relationships between phenomena” according to geographer Marie-Claire Robic. Applied to the development of a territory, the transect is a practice whose elements were theorized and applied at the beginning of the twentieth century, in particular by the urban planner and botanist Patrick Geddes in Scotland. A technique of representation as much as a field practice, the transect is now being revisited. For us, it is presented as a hybrid device between the technical section and the sensitive route: it is constructed through drawing, photography, measurement, text, and video, as much as it is practised in situ, by perception, speech, wandering, generally by walking. By rehabilitating the atmospheric dimension in urban representations and enabling the inclusion of inhabitants’ stories in the specialized debates between disciplines, the transect becomes a tool of interrogation and expression of the sensitive space and of lived practices. As such, the transect helps articulate two usually dissociated postures, those of analysis and of conception. Although it borrows its capacity to identify and collect the most different situations from the notion of an inventory, and even though it refers to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne atlases and Carlo Ginzburg’s indexical paradigm, the passage from the plan to the cross-section reveals the social, environmental, historical, and project-based thickness of the city. Through graphic representations, life stories, and perceptions of ambiances, the transect becomes a workspace that can be shared and amended between the actors of the territory: inhabitants, experts, as well as decision-makers and designers. In Deleuzian terms, we make it the symbol of an approach to the city “through the middle”. Between the great historical narrative of a city and the pragmatic micro-narratives of its use, the transect becomes an ideal narrative instrument for designing the urban ambiences of tomorrow as well as for situating the urban project within a larger “heritage” dynamic.