Urban cantonal roads in Swiss cities are key to reimagining mobility and urban public space. Co-design can advance the transformation of car-centric roads into sustainable, multimodal green infrastructures, linking Baukultur to our cities’ ecological and social transitions.
Infrastructure and streets are the backbones of Baukultur, shaping the public space where people, goods, and ideas intersect. Yet in many European cities, over half of this space is primarily dedicated to cars, limiting its potential to serve as thriving public places. What would happen if we redefined roads not just as routes, but as places of social cohesion and ecological resilience? This project will develop a series of visions and future scenarios to redefine Swiss cantonal roads into passage-paysages: green, multimodal infrastructures that prioritize active mobility, territorial connectivity, sustainability and people’s sociocultural experiences. By thinking about these roads otherwise, we can promote sustainable mobility, healthier lifestyles, and dynamic public areas that reconnect people with their local environments.
For this kind of transformation to be successful, an interdisciplinary effort is key partnering fields like architecture, urban design and geography with history, anthropology, environmental engineering, and policymaking, to work with local officials and technicians, civil actors and other stakeholders. Co-design will bring these actors together and ensure spatial and sociocultural coherence. Co-design actively engages participants through probing, generative, and prototyping tools to foster dialogue, translate concerns, integrate interdisciplinary know-hows, encourage inclusivity, and build shared visions of future urban spaces. Moreover, co-design can make complex transformations more socially and environmentally acceptable and, therefore, sustainable in the long term. Additionally, go-along interviews and intercept surveys will help us assess and integrate users’ experiences of Baukultur within new designs.
To produce a series of scenarios for the transformation of urban cantonal roads in Geneva, West Lausanne and Fribourg into passage-paysages, we will work one year at each city, developing for each of them a series of workshops where designers, citizens and stakeholders collaborate, first, to map the territory, then, to outline basic vectors of transformation, third, to design innovative scenarios, and finally, to prototype solutions that will be tested in real-world settings.
