POC Villeneuve d’Ascq Ville Nourricière
Nourishing city
In order to respond to the climate challenge and fight excessive minerality, preserve large landscape continuities and enhance biodiversity, Villeneuve d’Ascq is designing a nourishing city for its citizens. Agricultural areas are no longer just variables for adjustment to the needs of urban development or simple land to be preserved, but rather economic locations that meet the new challenges of local agriculture and short circuits.
Urban agriculture
Villeneuve d’Ascq, an innovative city of the 70s and 80s, is both very dense and filled with green spaces and fields. Through calls for projects on the agricultural land that belongs to the Metropolis of Lille and the city, it seeks to transform current leases into environmental leases, favouring organic products, short circuits and respect for the land or even its natural re-enrichment, particularly through permaculture. The organic plots of land will be used to partly supply the municipal canteens and nurseries.
Citizens and producers
The city seeks to identify spaces within public space that could be transformed into vegetable gardens cultivated by volunteering residents. Reciprocally, it wishes to enable citizens to contact the city in order to occupy certain neglected spaces, wastelands, building ground floors, etc., to cultivate them. Two shared gardens have already been set up in the neighbourhood’s centre, both in line with permaculture’s principles, enabling biodiversity conservation and even its increase.
The development of “natural” spaces and urban agriculture has led to the acceptance and appropriation of the city’s nature by residents and various stakeholders. Through large landscapes left to agriculture and interstitial spaces in the heart of cultivated neighbourhoods, Villeneuve d’Ascq ensures landscape and ecological continuity throughout the territory and turns nature into a lever for a friendly and nourishing city.
- Porteurs de projet/Project holders :Ville de Villeneuve d’Ascq
- Designers : Kartier Libre, les services de la ville / city services
- Acteurs/Stakeholders : villeneuvois, agriculteurs (exploitants actuels ou futurs), MEL / Villeneuve d’Ascq’scitizens, farmers (current or future), MEL
- Crédits photo / photo credits : Ville de Villeneuve d’Ascq