Collaboration: Journée 5 mai 2022 Commonds wilds infrastructures

Urbanity and naturalness need to get over the opposition that has divided them for so many years, and both require the construction of links, of a continuum. Ecological corridors, green links, systems of interconnected parks, etc. are at the heart of the reflections of the new urban planners in the contemporary city to fight global warming, absorb rainwater, and protect themselves from the wind. Infrastructures, with their linear geometry, have always had the capacity to connect communities, to accept dynamism, to encourage mobility. If we study them in detail, we realize that railways, roads and avenues leave residual spaces between the old and the new, between what Bernardo Secchi called the slow city and the fast city. Often reworked into a patchwork by man or spontaneously reoccupied by vegetation, these urban interstices are an opportunity to observe a new form of vegetation, an example of infrastructures that propose new forms of public nature (such as the linear forest in Paris along the Boulevard périphérique). These new shapes of green connections move away from the vision of the infrastructure as a link between the urban and urban, between the urban and the non-urban, and accept new flows, those of nature. Plants and animals occupy them, live in them and adapt to them. Seeds sow the earth with gravity, the wind and the passage of humans. Insects, mammals, invertebrates, birds, etc. nest and take refuge in these green infrastructures.