The Foyer Jettois housing complex consists of a series of blocks and plinths typical of the modernist architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. Built in contrast to the traditional fabric of the city, its legacy is now a built heritage full of ideals but aging, where spaces dedicated to cars have taken precedence over quality living and meeting spaces for residents. Despite the site's current enclave-like situation, there are nevertheless numerous opportunities to connect it to the city and the surrounding area. The site and its neighbors have the ambition to become a large urban space that benefits from both environments: the city and the park.
The project reverses the current vision of a main entrance via Rue Jules Lahaye and lays the foundations for a new access point from the future L50 park and Jette cemetery. The aim is to affirm the structuring potential of “the valley” and its system of parks, and to articulate the neighborhood's public spaces within it. The underground parking slab is converted into a large equipped platform, connected by an embankment to the L50 park. Inside the site, the pathways are redefined as a network of shared public spaces on which pedestrians, cyclists, and cars circulate at the same level, without obstacles to the green spaces. This network is organized around an east-west promenade that brings together the site's most public programs: a mosque, a large fountain, and a market hall. The large green spaces on the ground are reprogrammed as gardens for residents.
At a time of major climate challenges, this type of urban fabric, with its scale and open urban design, has strong and specific potential to embody climate transition in more ways than one: a dense neighborhood, easily accessible by public transportation, a green space linked to a metropolitan ecological corridor that maximizes water management, biodiversity, cooling islands, and recycling, and, from a social perspective, a neighborhood capable of supporting a greater mix of housing and production sites (manual activities, urban agriculture, etc.). The project aims to support this upcoming transition.