The guiding thread in Lausanne Jardins 2019’s story consists in revealing the soil of each of the sites, uncovering these sites’ natural and cultural history, their origin, future and potential, and their contribution to the wealth of the city. Clearing up their ambiguity and giving them a true identity as gardens.
The 2019 Festival will distance itself from purely aesthetic projects that put visitors in the position of passive spectators and will instead offer an interactive approach for them to ‘experience’ the gardens. On-site events will further increase the population’s interest for Lausanne Jardins and enhance its role as urban laboratory. These events will be planned and organised by the designers themselves as well as by users and neighbourhood associations and coordinated by Lausanne Jardins’ team. By promoting initiatives, meetings and relationships that will last long after the summer of 2019, the event will already have reached one of its goals.
The chosen approach of working in a contextual manner is perfectly suited to the participatory process. Two levels of participation have been defined:
1. On the festival route – a ‘diagnostic’ approach of the uses of each site and of the surrounding community network, with the aim of integrating the spirit of the place and meeting the actual needs of the place and the people that frequent it.
2. In the neighbourhoods, off the route – a co-creative approach to gardens and urban revitalisation; the idea being to identify and highlight what is already there on one hand, and, on the other, to breathe new life by providing resources and linking the current offer with collectives specialised in urban revitalisation.
More generally, the 2019 Lausanne Jardins Festival hopes to involve all local social and economic stakeholders. Targeted partnerships will be offered to companies and businesses located on the route.
Following on from 2014, the next edition wishes to highlight the multidisciplinary aspect of garden design and student participation. LJ 2019 wishes to go further by securing the participation of students from local art (ECAL), architecture (EPFL) and landscaping schools (HEPIA). This is a great opportunity to bring together future public space designers and urban planners around public space and gardening issues. The aim is to set up multidisciplinary groups, in order to develop one or several sites by considering gardens as tools to reflect on, transform and fashion the city.
In order to further embed the event in Lausanne’s cultural landscape and to advertise it beyond our borders, the 2019 Festival wishes to intensify its partnerships with other events. Specific contacts have been made with Festival de la Cité and Salon Habitat et Jardin as well as other events outside of Lausanne, including IBA BASEL 2020 and the landscaping festival Déambules in Annecy. In the context of the Year of the Garden 2016 – A Place for Meetings, a conference was set up last October with guest speakers from Switzerland and Spain.
As for previous editions, the issue of the gardens’ life beyond the Festival will be carefully examined. Participants in the competition will be asked to think about the post-event life of their design in order to maintain, transform or recycle the planned works.