We are talking about the “plain of the Var River”, an area of 10,000 hectares to the west of the city. Its development was planned back in the early 1990s: then Richard Rogers was ordered a master plan for its development with housing and commercial institutions, designed to be implemented within 50 years. Then it remained on paper, but 2040 obviously remains the finish line: it was by this moment that the so-called. Eco-Valley should become a hub for a variety of high-tech enterprises, research laboratories, educational institutions and green industry facilities, which will create 30,000 new jobs. This complex will be compactly located, on 450 hectares of area, and economic activity in the entire Alpes-Maritimes department will depend on it. Also, a stadium, an exhibition complex, tram and high-speed railway TGV lines, and new highways should appear there.
Koolhaas is required to establish a “new international position” for the Cote d'Azur, define the goals of the Var Plain renewal program and identify priority areas for its development, which could provide an optimal quality of life and environment for the 120,000 residents of the area in the long term.
The customer is the state through the "operation of national importance" - an urban planning program of special importance, which is carried out not by local authorities, but directly by Paris (there are now more than a dozen such programs in France).
For Koolhaas, this is far from the first such task: he, together with AMO, the research unit of his bureau, has already been working on the future of the Ruhr region, developed a plan to turn the North Sea into an international center for obtaining energy from renewable species, and last winter presented his most ambitious (to date) project: "Roadmap 2050" for the European Union. According to him, the production of electricity in the EU in 40 years will no longer be associated with the release of CO2 into the environment, since absolutely all energy sources will be environmentally friendly.
