POC Tiers-Lieu LA LOCO
Functionality and cooperation economy?
“We aim for cohesive and sustainable development but we find ourselves in classic facilities with no connection to the neighbourhood inhabitants or anything sustainable!” The key players of the Social and Solidarity Economy, always associated with the voluntary sector that doesn’tgenerate financial capital, are like the contemporary shoemakers who go barefoot and grow in a massive paradox between their situation and vocation …
A tool-building
In 2015, a collective of structures of Fives Cail, the city of Lille and the Metropolis, and coordinated by Laurent Courouble, a neighbourhood resident, gathered to explore the common desire of creating a “third place”. The idea was to create a host venue for neighbourhood initiatives in a participative and cooperative way. After a market study, the SAS Etic Foncièrement Responsable, a simplified joint-stock company and accredited“Solidary Company”, got involved in the project to build La Loco, an energetically speaking ultra-efficient tertiary building on the eco-neighbourhood of Fives Cail, with the following objectives ; to operate the building embracing a logic of shared uses, common working spaces, citizen café, biocoop …; All this in the shape of a Cooperative Society of Collective Interest which brings together in a multi-membership : tenants, partner companies, communities, users and neighbourhood residents.
Loc’actors?
Fashionable neologism built on the “consumer” model representing the reappropriation of ‘making’ in a society of passive consumption? Above all the idea is to have a building that is not just a “hotel for business” but a real “economy of functionality and cooperation”. The place offers 160 work positions with rents 10 to 30% below market prices for around thirty emerging structures, specifically engaged in the ecological and social transition. The service is “all inclusive” in order to allow these structures to free themselves from material contingencies, focus on their core business and promote cooperation between structures inside and outside the building, with the neighbourhood and its inhabitants.
- Project holders :SCI Lille portée driven by SAS ETIC Foncièrement Responsable, co-holders
- Designers : Atelier 204, co-holders
- Stakeholders : more than 375 people and structures have contributed since 2015
- Photo credits : Atelier 204