By Samuel Roumeau
INTERVIEW with Sophie Ricard on the exploration of A Thousand Places (1/8). For Sophie Ricard, responsible for the architectural permanence of the Hôtel Pasteur in Rennes, a Tiers Lieu is a space open to all, which promotes chance encounters, allows mutual learning and lays the foundations for a new city factory.
For some, the Third Places are above all spaces. For others, they are above all people. And you, how would you define it?
Sophie Ricard: A Third Place is a convergence between the two. Space and people who meet and claim a right to the city and to new ways of doing and organizing. As an architect, I use interstitial spaces, in transition. It is from these spaces without predefined use that we can reinvent things. Some say “in a library, I will create a Third Place”. But it is difficult to create in places where the institutions have already established rules, this is precisely the challenge to be met.
Space only becomes Third Place if it allows people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds to meet and exchange ideas. I am not for forced marriages, but rather to allow chance meetings. Finally, the Third Places are sort of public places and in this case Pasteur with a roof, which is not without friction, of course. When we welcomed sympathizers from the ZAD of Notre Dame des Landes to Pasteur, or even during the 20 years of the Elaboratoire, an artistic and cultural squat, this generated tensions with the elected officials. I am convinced that very positive things arise from these confrontations and that is what we can define Third Place.
A Third Place is a kind of public place with a roof.
I understand that the Third Places are meeting spaces. But how can we guarantee the open aspect of the place and avoid inter-self?
SR: The main pillar of openness for a Third Place is the “non-program”. The methodology to allow the unscheduled to be revealed has been to carry out what I call a “feasibility study in action”. We put the building to the test of uses, we do not judge the purpose of the projects we welcome. Who would we be if not: Pasteur’s artistic directors? I believe in a long time of experimentation and the reversibility of the building and its uses. If one day there is a social emergency in Rennes, the city can requisition Pasteur. We have put half the money in an investment in its renovation than conventional cultural equipment, which would not have met the needs of the population in the long run anyway.
In Pasteur, there is a constant movement of people and projects: you come between an hour to three months, no more. It is on this condition that one can really be open to the greatest number. But we are not the home of associations: Pasteur is not your local, you do not have your mailbox. There is a very strong culture of hospitality and welcome: we take everyone into consideration. If you lay down rules like: “Don’t come by car, and here we only eat organic”, you become totalitarian, you cut yourself off from a lot of people and above all, you don’t get the right message across. You cannot decree a common good, it is built from individuals who feel the freedom to be there and especially to do, to work alone and with others. The Third Place is not a place of assimilation. There would be nothing worse,
The main pillar of openness for a Third Place is the “non-program”
Source: Hotel Pasteur
The Hôtel Pasteur, an atypical project in the heart of Rennes Former Faculty of Science unoccupied for ten years, the Hotel Pasteur hosted between 2012 and 2014 the Foraine University on the initiative of Patrick Bouchain. It was an experimental approach based on openness to the public and appropriation by “doing”, the objective being to collectively decide on the future to give to the place. In 2015, the city of Rennes decided to rehabilitate the entire place, to back up a nursery school and to continue the work carried out in order to reinvent the Hôtel Pasteur. A large part of the premises will remain a “hotel for projects”: a non-programmable place, capable of accommodating the immediate needs of a society on the move, and governed by the Collegial Council of the association of the place. A way to make the experiment last over the long term.
You define Third Parties as spaces for experimentation. Does this mean that Third Parties are condemned to a transitional, therefore precarious, status?
SR: These places are ephemeral, yes, but that has nothing to do with transitory town planning or financial precariousness. By de-programming, we avoid planning, to say that we are leaving for a fifty-year project when we do not know the need in 50 years. But we give ourselves the means to keep the place alive as long as there are people who feel the need. In the ephemeral, we ask the question of what has more lasting I believe. With a new kind of economic model must support this logic of non-program and give it the stability it requires around the contribution of people. Here, we started on a framework of reciprocity through the trust given to a third party. We are working on a 4P model: Public-Private Individual Partnership. The individual is all of us, we are responsible! The city is involved in governance: it participates once a quarter in the local college council. User hosts are involved: each person who has occupied the building puts their time at the disposal of their occupation in order to help with the operation. We never used a cleaning company for example, and yet the Hôtel Pasteur is more than three thousand square meters. And in five years, we never lost the only key to the building that went from hand to hand. This is my favorite anecdote to show the commitment and the sense of responsibility of the residents. each person who occupied the building puts their time at the disposal of their occupation in order to help the operation. We never used a cleaning company for example, and yet the Hôtel Pasteur is more than three thousand square meters. And in five years, we never lost the only key to the building that went from hand to hand. This is my favorite anecdote to show the commitment and the sense of responsibility of the residents. each person who occupied the building puts their time at the disposal of their occupation in order to help the operation. We never used a cleaning company for example, and yet the Hôtel Pasteur is more than three thousand square meters. And in five years, we never lost the only key to the building that went from hand to hand. This is my favorite anecdote to show the commitment and the sense of responsibility of the residents.
That said, everything was easy for five years on the question of the economic model. We were in a building that cost nothing: no rent, no electricity, no heating … Tomorrow, we need a minimum of three hundred thousand euros per year to live between expenses, insurance and at least three salaries. It is nothing at all when you look at cultural equipment of equivalent surface, but it remains a sum to be found. The easy solution would be to partition the space by renting square meters. We especially do not want to remain open to all and especially to the most precarious of us.
The sustainability of the place is embodied in the PPPP model: Public-Private Private Partnership
Source: Urbis Le Mag
Sophie Ricard, a committed field architect
After having experienced architectural permanence for three years in Boulogne-sur-Mer, as part of the rehabilitation of sixty precarious homes, Sophie Ricard carried out the architectural permanence of the first project of the Foraine University in Rennes, initiated by Patrick Bouchain. Today, she acts as an AMO architect for the SPLA in order to support the transformation of the Hôtel Pasteur, to continue to ensure its daily operation and to invent, with everyone’s wishes and initiatives, a new mode of shared governance.
In your opinion, what needs does the Third Place of the Hôtel Pasteur meet?
SR: In reality, I never called Pasteur the Third Place … and I never asked myself the question either. Each individual has made their own definition: for some, this is the new MJC; for others, it is the new place of care outside of hospital structures; for still others, it is the new cultural equipment. The word Third Place came after. People wanted to stick a label. Basically, being a Third Place comes from things that emanate from a territory and the people who occupy it. It cannot be decreed.
In Pasteur, we could have made yet another cultural wasteland with all the usual culturists by forgetting the meaning of the word culture. It was the field study carried out upstream that made it possible to network a doctor who wanted to practice outside the hospital, a sports educator who needed spaces open to all. It did not matter to him that Pasteur was not a sports equipment, he said to us: “if necessary, I reinvent the rules of tennis”. The Third Places reveal the resources, visible and invisible, of their territory. In this, no Third Place is reproducible. Only the methodologies that it implements are.
The Third Places allow revealing the resources, visible and invisible, of their territory
It often seems difficult to justify the interest of Third Places with public authorities other than by the number of jobs generated. And you, what value do you perceive around the Third Places?
SR: In my opinion, the value of Third Places is above all human and social, therefore societal and political. These spaces allow people who are at a given point in their life, their professional and social journey to step aside, to exist in and for the city. They are places of individual emancipation in a collective framework, places of transmission and learning, schools outside the walls. And perhaps from these exchanges will arise projects that go beyond them, with positive externalities on the territory. A third-place does not keep people and projects! It is the emancipation of projects in a territory that is interesting, a third-place must innervate, irrigate!
For example, in Pasteur, we hosted for a month La Belle Déchette, a recycling project that could not afford to rent a space in the city center. If there had not been a free place allowing them to experiment, to be open to the general public and elected officials, there would not have been La Belle Déchette today on the territory. And this is where our positive balance of power with the city is played out, we have called it our “utility relationship”.
The Third Places are places of individual emancipation in a collective framework, schools outside the walls.
The Third Places would, therefore, be an eminently political project, a new factory of the city by and for the citizens? To the point of replacing public services?
SR: The Third Places are laboratories of innovation through experimentation in terms of civic responsibility and therefore political governance. In Paris, the transient urban planning project of Grands Voisins has completely revitalized the 14th, by introducing a very strong mix of uses and audiences. Even if the eco-neighborhood project in place of the Big Neighbors is not questioned, part of the current programming will be kept for future development. By demonstrating the social and human value of the project, the Big Neighbors managed to establish a power relationship with the city, which allowed them to inflect the initial project and to open a new relationship in the city and the private face to their vacant heritage. At Pasteur, it was different since there was no project: we had a blank page. But in the same way, it is the citizens who have given back to the building a use-value that it no longer had, through their projects, their inventiveness and their capacity to appropriate the premises.
It is true that Pasteur served as a public service and personal assistance for three and a half years. However, I do not believe that Pasteur, and Third Parties in general, should take the place of institutional actors. The two are complementary; we feed each other. For example, in Pasteur, we have just launched training sessions known as “Fairground University” with a psychiatrist from the city’s hospital institution for social workers in the city via the CCAS and the local mission to the growing and contemporary phenomenon of casualization individuals in society. The fabric of the city also plays out there: in the back and forth between institutional and “informal” actors.
The fabric of the city is played out in the back and forth between institutional and “informal” actors.
Finally, what do you think of the recommendation of the Mission Coworking which consists in professionalizing the profession of hosting Third Parties?
SR: I’m against it. Anyone can be a third party animator, it is above all a question of envy and posture. If you have to take your DU to be a janitor, it’s over. I am an architect, I do not have a concierge diploma and yet I do. You can be a waiter, hairdresser or geographer and take on this role. Each concierge must be able to come with their unique skills. This is what makes all its wealth. Afterward, I find the idea of mutual aid between animators interesting. Peer-to-peer training, small working groups to pool skills and give advice, it could help yes. The main thing is to make the link, to welcome. To seek out the other who does not come – so as to remain a place open and accessible to all.
The role of the Third Place is to seek out the other who does not come
This article is the result of teamwork with Solène Manouvrier. It is the first of a series of eight interviews carried out as part of the Mille Places exploration, available online at the following link: https://www.le-lab.org/exploration-mille-lieux
This work aims to objectify the impact of third places beyond the only economic prism, to better understand and enhance what is at stake in and around these spaces. It teaches us many things, often surprising, sometimes against the tide of what is said and read on third places … so good immersion!
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This post was previously published on OuiShare.net where the content of the website is licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 France.
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Photo credit: istockphoto.com