France, Luxembourg and Belgium tried to work with the existing situation: the lack of free space, the moral and physical aging of the infrastructure, the still unclear consequences of migration, climate change, and resource depletion. Denmark presented in its pavilion "Possible Greenland" - its territory, which is acquiring more and more autonomy, which is in a difficult situation, despite the presence of oil and free space …
The curator of the French pavilion, architect and urbanist Yves Lyon called his exhibition Grands & Ensembles: a paraphrase of the term “large ensembles”, which in France is called large residential areas. After World War II, more housing of this type appeared there than in any other Western European country: sometimes 500,000 apartments were rented per year. Now these residential areas have become a concentration of serious social problems, the solution to which is not easy to find.
Yves Lion took up the “eastern ridge” of seven large suburbs of Paris. After the implementation of the "Greater Paris" plan, they will be united by an express line, and then a city will appear, which is not on the maps, but where 300 - 400 thousand people live. Lion conducted a comprehensive study of its territory.
There are the notorious "large ensembles" with residents from all over the world and typical suburbs with cottages and townhouses. The low level of employment in "ensembles", their isolation from each other, from the environment and from neighboring large formations (for example, the Cité Descartes scientific and educational center and Charles de Gaulle airport) makes this area both full of contrasts and very monotonous. Yves Lyon proposed to turn this "latent city" into a real one by creating new connections between parts of the "eastern ridge", the infrastructure of cultural institutions, "urban farms" in often vast free territories. However, neither he nor his colleagues, including Jean-Louis Cohen, are confident of success: these suburbs have been considered problematic for 30 years, and it would be good if the situation changes for the better in at least the next 30 years.
Curators from Belgium and Luxembourg note: their territories are gradually turning into an endless city without a clear center, as in the Italian region of Veneto or in North Rhine-Westphalia. This is clearly an “unsustainable” development path, too dependent on non-renewable resources.
In the Belgian pavilion, the Flanders exhibition Territory Ambition, it is proposed to replace the current way of life and production with a fully integrated and complementary on a European scale, “spatial metabolism”, replacing minerals with “organizational” potential.
The Luxembourg Post-City pavilion is also looking at the country's transformation into one big city, albeit in a more “visionary” way. Curators are trying to manage this process by creating “urban corridors” between the center and the outskirts of the country.
These corridors are occupied either by towers for offices of agricultural firms among farmland, or by inverted pyramids in the middle of former industrial zones - recesses in the ground that serve as public space or for collecting rainwater. But the most original version of the "fundamentally new development" was a forest "agora" for demonstrators, where the natural environment should calm the protesters, preventing possible outbreaks of violence.
Against the background of these fantasies, "Possible Greenland" in the Danish pavilion seems to be something infinitely severe and serious. In 2009, Greenland achieved considerable autonomy from Denmark, which it views as a colonizing power, but continues to strive for independence. At the same time, the largest island in the world suffers from a lack of funds, despite the presence of minerals, which, however, must be mined with great care so as not to harm the environment, and also despite its popularity among tourists (although their flows still need to be learned to manage: When a cruise ship arrives, the population of a Greenlandic city could double overnight).
There is also the problem of migration: young people leave to study at universities on the mainland and never return, immigrants come to their place, of whom there are now more than 6 thousand with a population of 56 thousand, and employment among them reaches almost 100%, and among the indigenous people - only about 40%. Therefore, the national culture, scientific and entrepreneurial potential are under threat. Small settlements are dying out, residents are moving to cities, while there is a serious shortage of housing: the queue to receive it can be five years. It is also necessary to renovate ports and build new airports: due to the warming climate and the depletion of natural resources in the usual places of their extraction, the Arctic is attracting more and more attention from the rest of the world.
Although architects were called in to solve these problems, the curator of the pavilion was a world-renowned geologist, a native of Greenland, Minik Rosing. He was assisted by the Copenhagen bureau NORD, and BIG (a new airport in the port of Nuuk), Vandkunsten (a new typology of a house, where well-insulated "boxes" are placed in a common shell - a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, and free space, not heated until room temperature, used as a workshop, greenhouse, etc.), Henning Larsen's workshop (a series of cultural and social centers for the city of Ilulissat as a measure to preserve national culture and social ties).
But all these issues are very large-scale, they require human and material resources, while Greenland cannot boast of either one or the other: its income is small, and among the Greenlandic Eskimos, who make up 90% of the population, there is a high level of not only unemployment, but also suicide and consumption. alcohol. These sad statistics, given in the catalog accompanying the exhibition, underline the correctness of Olafur Eliasson, who suggested that the Greenlanders first of all get rid of the victim complex. The Icelandic artist said this in the final catalog of an interview, where he was asked - as a representative of a nation that only in 1944 gained independence from the same colonial power, Denmark - to advise Greenland on a development strategy.
