A collection of stories: Euralens Centralité and the Louvre-Lens Museum Park: Fid-Bau Portal

A collection of stories: Euralens Centralité and the Louvre-Lens Museum Park

Vega Santiago, Zeltia

Over the last four decades, French landscape architects have seen their roles in the transformation of a territory gain importance. They have been exploring ideas that use site characteristics such as cultural and geological history, the question of the passage of time, and the impact of climate or the planting strategy as the main tools in changing a territory. Their contributions represent an alternative to architectural and planning approaches which focus principally on responding to a programmatic agenda. This paper examines the role of landscape architecture in the transformation of a former mining site in Lens, France. I present two projects: the Louvre-Lens Museum Park by Catherine Mosbach and the urban project Euralens Centralité by Michel Desvigne. Both proposals rely on the traces of the old mining industry and on vegetation dynamics in designing two schemes capable of evolving over time. The result: two projects with the power to change the territory by consolidating the mining history of the site and proposing a new landscape-based model for development.