Douvres la Delivrande is a small town in Normandy near the sea and a few kilometers away from Caen. This geographical location makes it an ideal city for the people wishing to live close to the nature.

 

The town is easily accessible from the highway, therfore many people attracted by this quality of life have decided to move away from the urban center of Caen.

For many years, the city has grow massively with new people moving from the city center of Caen. The amount of new residents has created a chaotic urbanism with many detached house that consume a lot of land. The result is that constructible spaces are now increasingly rare.

 

The town has therefore engaged a large urban diagnosis of its city center, in order to restructure it, to create new urban potential and to make the town more attractive. This diagnosis plans to reconfigure the city center by creating new equipments, commercial areas and pedestrian streets for residents.

Among these new strategies, the city is also considering the creation of new collective housing.

 

Therefore, in order to accommodate new residents without accentuate the urban sprawl, the municipality has decided to sell to private developers a large plot in the city center for the development of a program of 40 collective housing as well as commercial activities.

 

The site area is 5000sqm and is partly facing the town hall. In the future, the municipality envisionne to buid a cultural equipment next to the plot. It will participate in the revitalization of the heart of the city.

 

The majority of the block in the city center are « car free » with the particularity of leaving a large space without cars, allowing residents to cross the block in a secure environment.

It is with this same concept of pedestrian porosity that the 40-unit project organizes the plot.

Indeed, the first urban strategy of the project was to create a vegetal environnement in the middle of the plot with a public pathway only accessible to the pedestrian, in order to connect the south part of the city to the town hall. It is a semi-private space that can be used by all residents and people of the city. All car traffic and parking spaces have been rejected at the boundaries of the plot in the shaded areas.

 

Then the whole program is developping over the rest of the plot. It consists of collective housing, intermediate and individual dwellings. Each of the buildings in the program has been implemented with care, and in response to the existing urban typologies around the plot.

 

The collective housing is 4 floors height with an accessible roof top. The building is located along the main axis of the city. On the street level, facing the town hall, there are local shops to create a lively area in the neighborhood.

 

Intermediate dwellings are located along the boundary of the future cultural equipment. It is a building with many different volumes with a maximum height of three floors, acting as an urban articulation between the collective and individual housing buildings. The circulation are mainly outdoor with many terraces for the residents.

 

At last, individual housing is the last typology of the program. They are located in the south part of the plot to respond to the houses facing the site, and they are mainly grouped in pairs.

 

This new program will participate in the urban renewal of Douvres la Délivrande, by proposing a new kind of housing, a new kind of architecture typology, while integrating into the existing context.