CANOPY - Exploration of the capacity for and experience of reusing urban rooftops in Lyon (2017)

Summary:

CANOPY involves practitioners (Lyon Urban Planning Agency and the associations Marmite Urbaine and GROOF) and researchers from a number of different fields (geography, ICT, urban planning, law, architecture and sociology). The aim of the project is to explore the capacity for the rooftops of Lyon to host urban activities and evaluate specific experiments in urban agriculture. In the context of sustainability, translated into the search for urban compactness, and a marked re-urbanisation since the turn of the century, urban rooftops, one of the constructed components of the urban canopy, may provide a reserve of 'land' able to accommodate needs in terms of living, recreation, production and in particular agricultural space. The CANOPY project has been designed as prospective research into future urban environments, firstly by the development of multidisciplinary reflection on the more global question of planning the urban canopy (workshops), on an analysis of the manners in which rooftops can be reused, focusing only on urban agricultural activities, and lastly on the preparation of methods for assessing the available capacity of rooftops, whether for agricultural or other uses, either recreational or functional (areas for walking for pleasure or in order to get from A to B, etc.).