Strasbourg / Shanghai Mirroring

We know that today's metropolitan territories are increasingly difficult to grasp in their complexity. How to read and understand them through their forms and uses? How can their complexity become conceptual matter for their future design? 
To try to answer these questions, we have examined the specificity of the elements composing today's big city by mirroring of two metropolitan situations: rail bundles, urban highways, stations and interstitial situations, housing districts in transformation, public, collective and private spaces that are sometimes entangled. These elements were to be grasped in their own essence, without neglecting the practices to which they refer, and were related to the globality of the territory in order to understand the great figures, the coherences and the contrasts that allow to describe it. Through the "words" of the territory and its architecture, we have constructed "narratives" that allow us to represent and read the metropolis of today with its strong, although sometimes disturbing, images.