Discussing sustainable building and housing in Grenoble

Round table on sustainable building and collective design chaired by Amélie Artis, contributions by Lucile Couvreur, François Gillet and Stefan Pollak

At the end of October our partners from Sciences Po, the school for political sciences at the University of Grenoble-Alpes in France invite to a two days seminar on sustainable building and housing. More than 50 students with backgrounds in socio-economics, public administration and urban planning along with professionals and other attendees have participated at the joint program chaired by our partner Amélie Artis.

BIØN could contribute with a general presentation of experiences gathered during 6 years of LearnBIØN, the network's training program. Lucile Couvreur introduced the audience to the specificities of building in direct collaboration with local communities and with locally sourced materials within a framework of building and training. François Gillet and Stefan Pollak have animated two active seminars inviting students and other participants to a deeper reflection on the human dimension of collaborating for the habitat and on participative design and build processes. During a round table the contributions triggered interesting questions from the audience and its interdisciplinary composition fuelled stimulating discussions.

Other contributions included a conference on affordable housing and ecological transition by urbanist Adriana Diaconu from the Institute of Urbanism and alpine Geography Grenoble and a round table on different approaches of housing cooperatives in the larger Grenoble area with Aurelie Caillaud (SCIC AtticorA), Benjamin Pont (Habitat & Partage), Rémi Pascual (SAS Habitée).

Lucile Couvreur illustrates 6 years of experience with the training program LearnBIØN.

Round table on co-housing strategies for the larger Grenoble-area chaired by Amélie Artis, contributions by Aurelie Caillaud (SCIC AtticorA), Benjamin Pont (Habitat & Partage), Rémi Pascual (SAS Habitée)