CITY CITÉ Atlanta x Marseille : Metropolitan Trails : A New Generation of Public Space in Marseille and Beyond with Alexandre Field

College of Design Auditorium, Georgia Institute of Technology 

245 4th St NW 

Atlanta, GA, US 30332  

No registration needed 

Metropolitan Trails are a new kind of collective experience that unfold in space over time. These social
platforms are designed to reconnect us to our local urban environments by bringing together inhabitants, artists and experts in a vital conversation on post-petroleum oil cities. Metropolitan Trails are an international urban innovation, born which came out of Marseille, France with the creation of GR2013, the first metropolitan trail in the world.

In this talk, the creator and project coordinator of “Bureau des guides” (the Hiking Office) in Marseille,
Alexandre Field, will share “some tales from the trail.” From the design of a metropolitan
trail in France during Marseille’s stint as the European Capital of Culture in 2013, to the many iterations of its “Bureau des guides” up to the present day, the GR2013 can be seen as a cultural hiking path, an open air theater, an outdoor school, home to grass-roots cultural centers and, open-air schools. Above all, the Metropolitan trails are an an extraordinary way to tell the stories of the land and its inhabitants.

“One of the lasting legacies of Marseille’s stint as European Capital of Culture in 2013 is this long-distance trail around southern Provence. The semi-urban trail takes the shape of a giant figure-of-eight—also intended to represent the symbol for infinity—and has been designed as a work of art in its own right.” NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ‘BEST NEW TRAIL’ (2014) 

Alexandre Field is an associate professor at the National Superior School of Architecture of Marseille (ENAM, Ecole nationale supérieure d’architecture de Marseille).  Aside of is activity as a professor and researcher, he founded and manages different cultural projects that propose a new way to appropriate territories such as the organization Le Bureau des Guides. Alexandre Field’s work in the Bureau des Guides is situated at the intersection of cultural, urban and environmental issues and aims to rethink the city from an ecological and environmental perspective.  

 
This talk is presented by the College of Design at Georgia Institute of Technology, Villa Albertine and France-Atlanta. 

Designed in 2015 and first implemented in Chicago and San Francisco, CITY CITÉ is a transatlantic cooperation and exchange program on urban issues and city making, initiated by Villa Albertine, the cultural institution of the French Embassy in the US. 
 
In 2022, CITY CITÉ comes to Atlanta for the first time on the occasion of the French Consulate’s annual France-Atlanta program, Atlanta Design Festival and the City of Atlanta’s ELEVATE festival. CITY CITÉ – Atlanta x Marseille 2022 aims to make a case for the role of culture in urban and social development, by creating a dialogue between cities of Atlanta and Marseille and inviting La Friche la Belle de Mai, a major institution in Marseille, at the forefront of cultural, social, environmental and urban innovation. 

CITY CITÉ – Atlanta x Marseille 2022 is supported by the Institut français, Villa Albertine, The City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs and France-Atlanta.