Abstract

ECObox is a project initiated by the Self-Managed Architecture Workshop, offering the inhabitants of La Chapelle the chance to occupy an abandoned space and to transform it into a participatory garden and a place for debate. The practice of the Workshop tests and provokes the « availability » of the city through « urban tactics » directed toward the interstitial condition and multiple temporalities of certain spaces in the city. At stake is a spatial production from the bottom up, re-energising spaces and collective uses through micro-devices that spring from common dynamics and everyday ways of doing. The ECObox project is a platform of urban production through a heterogenesis of practices mixing the knowledge and know-how of inhabitants, architects, researchers and artists. It is a «heterotopian» worksite where the city is fabricated in real time, by an experimental interpenetration between specialized and common knowledge, springing from lived experience; a worksite at the « ground floor of the city » in which any inhabitant can enter at their own level and propose a cultural, social or political project to the others