For its peculiar industrial history, the Fives Cail brownfield is a symbol. The City of Lille wished to make out of it an exemplar place, where you can dwell, work and entertain. We thus decided to create a Β« Halle gourmande Β»: a place dedicated to food, mixing cooking, productive and food-services activities. For the same reason we carried up the project of a Β« community kitchen Β», designed as a tool for sharing and empowering, a place to gather for the simple pleasure of cooking.
Since its main purpose is social inclusion, anyone shall be able to get there to share time and know-how with friends and family. Once carried up by the industrial fleuron, the neighborhood has dramatically declined. Young people half of population is under 30 can meet little job opportunity in the surroundings. An ambitious urban renovation project has started in in order to transform the 20 hectares of industrial brownfield into an original pattern of housing and activities.
Though urban projects can offer new services, new public spaces, and social mixity, rarely or never the gentrification process is addressed from the start. Rarely the existing population can benefit directly from the new activities brought by. Providing a shared space to socialize. There you may cook, eat, meet people, and make new experiences including an audio-visual studio, and a vertical agriculture demonstrator ;. Organizing workshops, mostly against waste and malnutrition;.
Creating a virtuous ecosystem of training and job opportunities: crash courses, and meeting with employers on the one hand; restaurants and food processing activities on the other hand. Most part of the innovation lies within the fact that, contrary to the usual public equipment, the kitchen will respond to an original collective governance. Furthermore, it will be financially autonomous while receiving part of the benefits from private activity operating in the vicinity.
A dense prefiguration program will anticipate, during the first 2 years of the program, the inauguration of the building. In , while the brownfield progressively becomes a spectacular new piece of urban fabric, the collective kitchen attracts the neighborhood. Bartering recipes, meeting regularly at the kitchen, some inhabitants venture in a new economic activity, taking advantage of the micro-incubator. March : end of the initiation phase, starting meetings with the local population in order to co-design the future kitchen.
