Born in Strasbourg city in 2009, out of the architecture school, the “Collectif Etc” aim to gather desires toward civic dynamics of public space’s issues. Using different resources and skills, the “Collectif” wish to offer various supports for experimentation.

The way France designs its cities mainly follows top-down and hierarchical process. Together with experts of city planning, it usually follows strict spaces and fixed times. Nevertheless, we think that the collection of disparate city users (both experts and citizens) might be all, at different scales, actors of their own environment. We hope to interfere in that vertical framework and set up a network of social and artistic interactions, creating meetings and debates.

Our projects desire to be optimistic, open-minded and directed toward the spontaneous cities’ audience. Most of them deal with public spaces, and try to include local citizens into the creative process. They figure built installations, urban furnitures, scenographies, light and removable set-up. We also initiate meetings, debates, participate to many conferences and pedagogical workshops.

The aim of these urban experiments do not only take its importance in the built objects but mostly in the tracks that lead to it, the new atmosphere and unused behaviours it might produce.

Here are a few texts we’ve wrote and a choice of projects’ english summaries.
– A point of view on the “future of architecture”
– A point of view on the “Availability”
– The PhD of Florent Chiappero, one of us
– An english version of the book we’ve wrote on a trip around France we’ve made in 2012 that aimed to meet different cities’ civic initiatives.

“Collectif Etc” is a non-profit organisation since 2010 and now based in Marseille city since 2014. As employees, we’re nine architects and one chief administrator, though we regularly work with some twenty other partners. We try out self-management methods and autonomous ways of working together since the very beginning. That way, we hope to prove that democratic and horizontal mode of operation is both possible and accessible.

In 2012, Collectif Etc has ride all around France with its “Détour de France” with one idea on mind : “civic city planning”. Same year, we won the “Palmarès of young urbanists“.

In 2014, along with a few others, we created a publishing house around these issues called “éditions Hyperville“.

In 2016, we’ve settled in a Marseille city’s suburb and started to open our office and create a long term civic local project called the “Ambassade du Turfu“.

Projects with english abstracts (click on the right) :
– 2011, Place au Changement, Saint-Etienne, France.
– 2013, Autobarrios, in Madrid, Spain.
– 2014, Darmstadt, in Osthang, Germany.
– 2016, La Cité de Chantier, in Caen, France.
– 2016, Papomo, in Marseille, France.
– 2018, Venice Architecture 16th Biennale, in Venise, Italy.
– 2018, The Roc, in Plateau de l’Arbois, France.
– 2018, A northern Atoll, in Tromso, Norway.