Green ToOl_ouse - Europan 11

In a highly fragmented urban context, reconnecting and making sustainable development are the main goals for reshaping and restore dignity to a part of town that, for its location, marks one of the key steps between center and suburbs. To confirm the need for re-stitching of the urban fabric there is the presence of the railway that, with its wide beam tracks, amplifies the gap between citizens and the use of urban space. The “green system”, in its meanings of public and private space, becomes a strategic tool (the “green tool”) to pursue the concepts of 'reconnection' and 'sustainability' at the base of the project: on the one hand, it reconstructs the urban network made up of lost ideals and physical links with the uncontrolled “sprawl” of contemporary planning. And secondly, it provides and ensures a development compatible with the growing need for environmental protection, even in a really dense ' critical mass' reality as this area of Toulouse. The green becomes a new “urban pattern”: areal, linear or accurate, it is used to restore continuity between the center and the suburbs and reorganize the use of the area near the railway. The prospective of building a high-speed rail line is one of the starting points of the project: the presence of existing tracks serves as a dividing line for the editable and invariabile areas. The 'cut' made in this way, however, is repaired by a dual system of green spaces: • a linear park (whose head is made up of a large parking lot that models urban land) along the railway. It creates a physical filter capable of mitigating the environmental impacts of infrastructure; • a green platform, placed trasversally, is used as a second connecting element, can overcome height differences between the two parts of the city divided by the railway.