LIVING COASTLINE
Modernist categories of natural and artificial are becoming less and less useful tools for understanding our relationship with the environment. The profound hybridity of today's landscape, where the traces of human processes are ever more inextricably interwoven with nature, forces us to consider the land from angles other than that of nostalgia. While there's no doubt that the 1976 highway embankment that erased the river's original flats was an ecological catastrophe, to attempt to bring back an "originalist" reading of the Beauport territory by recreating the lost landscape would be to make the same mistake again, but in reverse. The bucolic quest for an idealized nature is a nostalgia that would erase the site's entire recent history.
Yet accepting that in this anthropogenic age, humans have irrevocably transformed the landscape does not mean abandoning the struggle to find a fairer balance between humans and non-humans. Until now, the artifacts produced by industrialization and urbanization have often been brutally imposed on the environment. Is it possible to find a more productive hybridity, a deeper encounter where past and future human artifacts settle into a symbiotic relationship with the living, in today's areas of friction between city and nature?
While the Promenade Samuel-de-Champlain project west of Quebec City proposes a landscape entirely at the service of humans, the Littoral Est project explores how biodiversity can be intensified without resorting to the image of a pristine, untouched nature. The project embraces all the historical layers of the landscape, including those that have contributed most to the disconnection between humans and non-humans. This reinvestment of the artifacts of modern culture by lush nature becomes the image of this new alliance of the living. Far from the typology of the urban park, where nature is entirely domesticated, the coastline is transformed into an interface where the city directly adjoins pockets of free, teeming nature.
From its earliest beginnings, ecological thinking has demonstrated that the resilience of natural systems comes primarily from their interconnectedness and interdependence. By using the coastline and the three rivers that flow into it, we can reconnect certain reservoirs of biodiversity isolated by urbanization and fragmentation. The coastline, which previously focused exclusively on human mobility, is also becoming an important axis for the mobility of non-human life. A series of landscape interventions are working to create edges between different biomes, areas that are always rich in biodiversity.
This project for the redevelopment of the coastline enters these uncertain times with an assumption: architecture, landscape architecture and land-use planning must ensure that nature expresses itself once again. This project is an opportunity to recreate the ecological links between marine and terrestrial ecosystems, as well as the socio-ecological links between citizens and the biological diversity of the coastline.
(From competitor's text)
(Unofficial automated translation)
This proposal offers an ambitious vision that focuses on increasing the greening of the site to the point of envisaging it as a major green infrastructure, consequently providing for a significant reduction in the asphalt of the freeway in favor of a completely different urban boulevard experience, of the parkway type. The jury appreciated the clarity of the proposal's underlying principles, namely to restore a harmonious balance between man and nature by recreating ecological links between marine and terrestrial ecosystems. The detailed understanding of regional scale, topography and rivers feeds a particularly coherent project, and this at different scales. The strategies for coastal development are particularly well translated, and the various poles proposed have been very well designed, clearly demonstrating the qualities to be offered. Each of them presents a sensitive approach where conversion into an ecological environment proposes the formation of micro-habitats. The overall approach (although less radical than that of other proposals) is considered as sensitive as that which inspired each of the poles, and realistic in the short term, responding well to the needs of the environment and promoting access to the river by citizens. The reduced scale of the urban boulevard's right-of-way is deemed adequate, although the jury questions the relevance of maintaining two transit axes side by side. North-south pedestrian connectivity does not appear to be optimized in terms of experience, as it is still in contact with the car. However, the ecological aspect of the proposal is well received, thanks in particular to the sinuosity of the layout, uncommon in other projects. The transformation of north-south viaducts into parks planted for the benefit of pedestrians and cyclists is a gesture welcomed by the jury, in a nod to the motorway's past, and which can draw inspiration from the well-known success of New York's "High Line". The recovery of the remains of the pillars of the existing Île d'Orléans bridge, alongside the proposed new bridge, adds a heritage dimension that deserves mention. This project stands out for the clarity of its presentation, the realism of its approach and the relevance of its ambitions in terms of urban greening.
(From jury report)
(Unofficial automated translation)
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