Shared, consolidated and adapted: the city of tomorrow as seen by the architect, Dominique Cécile Jakob

In 2024, one in four French people over 15 reported feeling loneliness¹. How can architecture contribute to creating or strengthening social ties? 

First of all, this involves working with the history of places and what remains of them, be that in a tangible or intangible sense. When you take care to preserve the history of places, respect them for what they are and have been, inhabitants and users embrace projects more willingly and social ties form naturally. To help strengthen these ties, architecture must also ensure that the spaces between the structural elements encourage meetings and interaction. In an architectural plan, there are of course spaces where we live or work, but there are all these other areas in between – entrance halls, reception areas, etc. – that must be given special attention by architects. I am a keen advocate, for example, for outdoor spaces for housing. When you live in a village, as soon as you leave your living room or your hallway, you are immediately out on the street, on the pavement, where it’s hot, it’s raining or it’s windy. Designing a city isn’t a question of coming up with sanitised, sealed places that separate individuals from each other. To break out of this isolation, you need to look at the ways in which people used to live very close to one another and how this day-to-day contact encouraged interaction. Adapting urban areas to climate change also plays a role in maintaining social ties. If you feel comfortable when you are outside and can find cool places in the summer, you are more likely to talk to your neighbours than if you jump from an air-conditioned car straight into an air-conditioned space. Some cities are better equipped to deal with climate change than others, often due to the way in which they were designed many centuries ago. There used to be a “genius loci”, an intuitive spirit or sense of a place, which in some locations was lost with the developments of the 20th century. It would be useful to recover this sense.

The housing crisis is one of the challenges facing cities. What role can architects play in tackling this issue? 

To deal with the housing crisis, the pooling of spaces is one promising solution, since it enables ever diminishing economic resources to be reconciled with growing need for comfort. We must be able to adapt housing to the cycle of the seasons, enabling inhabitants to enjoy “cosy” family moments at home when it’s cold and, conversely, take advantage of shared spaces in the spring or summer. Some of the shared spaces could be specifically designed for children, others for people working remotely. In France, we have a great deal of difficulty in sharing our washing machines, for example. However, on average, they take up one square metre in each housing unit. When you think about the cost per square metre, which can reach 10,000 euros in some cities, it would seem to make sense for this function to be shared between several households. In fact, in other countries, this is fairly common. The same might be said for kitchens, that we must be able to share more easily, especially as doing so can also help to forge ties. Dealing with the housing crisis also involves densification or consolidation in cities and controlling urban sprawl. I see densification as a vertical extension of urban space, a little bit like if the village road climbed upwards! The challenge is to make this verticality appealing, full of life and habitable.

In a neighbourhood, how can mixed use contribute to making cities more pleasant places in which to live? 

We can create neighbourhoods that are full of life by having a diverse mix of facilities. That is how you break up large central blocks and create smaller structures that strengthen the social ties we mentioned earlier. A city should not be just a series of juxtaposed specialist areas, dedicated exclusively to offices or retail, nor should there be an artificial separation between a “working city” and a “housing city”. You need to be able to run into people in the morning, afternoon, evening and at the weekend. When you manage to create a sense of community in a neighbourhood, inhabitants naturally take greater care of their surroundings. Conversely, when you don’t really live in a place, you don’t feel responsible for it. The ‘15-minute city’ concept, focusing on proximity, therefore seems to be extremely apt to me. This is equally true of the practice of recycling or converting office spaces into housing, which leads us to think about how we can inject life and activity into these areas so that they become micro-centres where you feel comfortable. In certain large housing districts, sometimes all that is needed to reinject life, activity and energy into them is to install a few facilities or structures.

In an ideal world, what would a sustainable city look like in 2030 or 2050?  

As I see it, it would be a garden-city, in the spirit of those dreamt up by utopians at the start of the 20th century, such as Tony Garnier. Urban transport would no longer operate at ground level but would travel through the air, making the city even more habitable. It would also be a city featuring micro-centres and meeting areas, where all essentials would be within easy reach in a given neighbourhood. Above all, it would be a city that has fully adapted to the effects of climate change, especially to heat, which is more difficult to withstand than cold. In this city of the future, we will therefore need to manage the flow of air to keep urban areas cool, but also think about the shade cast by buildings. This is actually something I am currently working on with students, looking at shade in urban settings. Medieval cities got this right: their narrow streets created shaded areas naturally. It is also worth noting the clever way in which rainwater was integrated into urban systems, whilst the market square and wash house were places that encouraged interaction and discussion, including across generations. Fundamentally, medieval cities could, in many ways, provide a source of inspiration for the city of the future!

Source :

[1] Fondation de France. URL : https://www.fondationdefrance.org/fr/cat-personnes-vulnerables/etude-solitudes-2025 

Photo : A Tabaste