Villeneuve d’Ascq

In the mid-1960s, the French government launched a programme for the creation of new towns. Dating from 1971, the plans for the city of Lille East (now called Villeneuve d’Ascq) in the conurbation of Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing place strong emphasis on natural areas with the inclusion of artificial lakes as the starting point for a system of parks. By addressing issues such as landscape and urban scale, as well as architectural character, this chapter studies a variety of housing schemes with different densities along the lakes. Highlighting issues of density of pedestrian pathways and of the riverine quality of the landscape, the selected case studies are of particular interest to contemporary designers of ecological neighbourhoods. industrialists and the changing relationship between the river and the built-up settlements on its banks. He was among the first to underline the potential of the Sabarmati as a natural landscape to gaze at. This chapter discusses how, since the early 1960s, architects and urban planners, such as Bernard Kohn and Bimal Patel, had questioned the role of the Sabarmati to give a new identity to Ahmedabad.