Eco-districts, an opportunity to change cities?
Within the frame of the exhibition "Cosmopolis", the University of Neuchâtel and the Swiss Society of engineers and architects (SIA) invited Prof. Emmanuel Rey from the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) to give a conference dealing with definitions, issues and potentialities inherent to the concept of Eco-districts.
Strictly speaking, an eco-district project gives priority to the environmental dimension of the operation, in other words on its energy performance and on the reduction of its environmental footprint. In addition to these environmental aspects, a sustainable neighborhood project integrates an increasing number of sociocultural and economic issues. Thus they are the objectives which come from three sustainable development centers which are taken into account in this case. But it should be mentioned that this semantic distinction remains rather vague in practice and that the terms are not necessarily used wisely.
By presenting examples carried out in various European countries, Prof. Emmanuel Rey's conference highlighted the conceptual and operational developments of this rapidly developing field. He particularly insisted on the fact that a sustainable neighborhood cannot be regarded as a closed and withdrawn system. By its size and quality, this type of approach can indeed create an added value – in the spatial, environmental, economic and sociocultural sense of the word – for an urban area far beyond its own physical limits.