In the current context of a changing urban landscape, LJ2019 aims to re-appropriate the city and echo the issues at play therein – in particular, the main issue of development for modern cities: re-conquering open spaces. Lausanne Jardins provides an opportunity to focus on the issue of public spaces as a defining element for quality of life in the city – urban spaces adapted to new practices, open to everyone, mainly focused on improving community life.
The basic premise of the 2019 festival: to redefine the city through gardens, to use gardens as a tool to transform, enliven and fashion the city. The gardens strike a nerve, revealing uncomfortable and abandoned places in the public space, places that do not work but also places that have potential.
With its temporary and therefore reversible installations, Lausanne Jardins acts as an ideal urban laboratory. The contemporary art of gardening serves as a tool for the creation and transformation of public spaces to live in: community spaces, playgrounds, meeting spots in the city centre and in the various neighbourhoods. All this with the aim of helping public spaces, and the city by extension, reclaim their full cultural, social and democratic dimension.
Lausanne Jardins 2019 aims to document the event’s development and subsequently publish a scientific work, a sort of construction method for the city, or a manual. It will assemble the empirical content and the many urban experimentations of the previous editions in order to transform pragmatic experiments into actual tools to design and transform public spaces. This approach will be enhanced by the candidates’ proposals as well as by the contributions of external practitioners and theoreticians.