The Metropolis of the 21st century: the project of a porous city

In May 2008 ten international multidisciplinary teams were selected to work on “Grand Paris”, the Parisian agglomeration: a non-easily definable object of research.
The task was an imposing one: due to the complexity of the region; the twofold request (a reflection on the 21st century metropolis after Kyoto and on the Paris region; due to the lack of a specific form of governance on a metropolitan scale.
This experience, the story of the ideas and work developed and presented by one of the teams, can be told as a sequence of research operations, as a progressive understanding of some crucial aspects of the region’s present conditions. The use of porosity as a guiding concept has had interesting consequences in the research. Maps can reveal the structure of connectivity, permeability and porosity. One can take measures, deals with ratios and with fresh figures that appears on the maps. But to investigate porosity obliges to explore other worlds, to look for what is not in the maps and is not in the statistical data. To be represented, porosity needs to follow circumstantial evidence, field-work, close reading and story-telling. Other representations become useful, where the quality of space and the practices investing it have the same right to be there.