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.

Urban architecture in Europe today generally follows a hierarchical top-down process with the different actors from an urban planning background. We believe that the future users of the public areas can also be actors in the development planning at different levels. To achieve this, we propose to instigate a series of meetings, debates and workshops to integrate the local population in a creative bottom-up process. Our projects aim to be optimistic, open-minded, and directed towards the spontaneous interactions with the local citizens and future users from the public. Many of our projects have transformed public spaces, landscapes and buildings through construction workshops and creative interventions that replace the more usual top-down ways of designing spaces. Several of them have included the construction of urban furniture, scenography or light removable structures as part of these urban experiments. All of them use the different communication tools and methods that Collectif Etc has developed over the last 10 years to facilitate the creative bottom-up process.

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.