Architecture Urbaine, Cultures de Projet et Outils Conceptuels en Débats

France and, specifically, possibilities for the renewal of the discipline’s project approaches and theories, taken in the context of increased awareness towards the multiple challenges presented by the contemporary European city. It thus highlights fundamental changes in conceptual frameworks (ways of thinking and structuring notions) since Urban Architecture’s first definition in France in the 1970s, and critically analyses the “projet urbain” approaches, as developed in the French context since the 1980s. The idea of the “metropolitan project” as a renewed urban planning and design approach is thus investigated both from a retrospective and a prospective critical view point : on one side, by reviewing the “projet urbain”’s theories and methods; on the other, by exploring three conceptual and operating design tools – narrative, figure and scenario. Within this emerging narrative-descriptive design culture, renewed intellectual stances, reflexive processes and mental representations help develop new meanings of the “metropolitan project”, marking both continuities and points of departure with respect to the legacy of the “projet urbain”.