The conclusions of the first scientific report on climate and environmental change in the Mediterranean region, presented at the UfM Regional Forum on October 10, 2019 in Barcelona, tell us that the Mediterranean area is warming 20% faster than the rest of the world. However, today there is no specific training from architecture schools on the impact of global warming and its effects on metropolitan areas on the Mediterranean coast. The question today is much more focused on the architectural object than on the territorial and urban approach. We therefore propose to address the resilience of territories of metropolitan areas on the Mediterranean coast through three case studies: the Tangier-Tetouan region, the Venice lagoon and the heart of the Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis. We want to develop our teaching methods through workshops that pave the way for tailor-made solutions and enriched by the multiplier effect of the crossing of skills and methods of the teachers participating in this project. The four partners of this project are higher schools of architecture teaching architecture and urban design on the Mediterranean site and which wish to bring together their knowledge and their interest in the Mediterranean area. The ENSA Marseille is the leader of this project, conducted with the ULB in Brussels, the National School of Architecture of Tétouan in Morocco and the IUAV in Venice, they are both very involved in their respective territories. The Agency for Sustainable Mediterranean Cities and Territories (AVITEM) has joined forces with the group to provide insight and articulation towards the socio-professional world. The teaching and training actions take place over three years, each academic year will be dedicated to one metropolitain situation and will allow us to cross our teachings and working methods, both for the knowledge of the sites and for the hypotheses of solutions resilient to climate change. We wish to renew the ways of approaching development by renewing working and teaching methods on three axes, by crossing our respective workshop practices with moments of intensive meetings on site twice a year. The progression will be made by a round trip between our workshops, in our schools and with our teaching methods, and collective crossings on site. First of all by building in the workshop the knowledge on these territories by collaborative cartographic tools, which will then be measured in a second time with the reality during the in site immersions through intensive collective workshops. Finally it will be a question of exchanging and crossing our visions and our work in the following semester, during the “return” meeting on site, to produce hypotheses of resilient projects for these coastal metropolises. Each of these phases gives rise to a prior intellectual production which serves both as a training guide for cartographic representation (atlas), intensive field lessons (workshop) and multi-scalar resilience projects. They are tested during long semester times and during short periods of one week intensive. The students' productions come to extend and enrich these supports by the crossed and collaborative productions, not only in the practice of the group project, but also by the individual works which will come to feed the wiki database. The multiplicity of media is directed to different audiences, both academics (teachers, students, and even researchers) and the professional world. This articulation between university and socio-professional environment is conducive to the renewal of practices and the strengthening of the potential employability of the students. And finally we transfer these methods to the world of planning professionals in the form of a distance learning module.
During the project, we wanted to improve teaching methods by crossing skills, scales and methods between schools. We produced new training content to raise students' awareness of the challenge of sustainable urban and regional development through design. In order to encourage the emergence of a shared culture of working through architectural and urban planning projects, we have created the conditions for project production, bringing together local public and private players to offer stimulating practical work situations. In this way, we have contributed to the understanding and development of appropriate methods for tackling the issues raised by resilient Mediterranean coastal areas. Once the project has been completed, we need to strengthen our Master's degree courses to build up their specific features, which can then be combined to create a joint Master's degree. We want to adapt and create new professions in line with societal challenges, and thus increase the employability of students in the Mediterranean basin; raise awareness and mobilise the world of institutional players, companies and investors in relation to the new societal challenges.
The project focuses on Mediterranean coastal areas and the urbanisation process that characterises them. They are subject to strong pressure linked to this process, as well as to the effects of phenomena linked to climate change. The MedEc 2020 report predicts a warming of 2.2°C in this part of the world by 2040, which is likely to generate climatic conditions that many Mediterranean ecosystems have not faced for 10,000 years. There is no specific teaching focusing on metropolisation and the environmental, socio-economic, energy and health risks (climate change, pandemics, access to resources) around the Mediterranean basin. It is therefore necessary to provide architecture students with a specific skill: schools still focus much more on architecture and construction, and far too little on sustainable urban planning. In this context, this project is helping to enrich the methods and training on offer by producing new methods for reading a territory, new representations and evolutions in the forms of projects integrating the notions of sustainable urban planning.