The new district with a total area of 800 thousand square meters, which promises to become one of the largest development projects in Europe, is planned to be built on the territory of the municipality of Gonesse, which is 16 km from Paris. Located close to Le Bourget and Charles de Gaulle airports, Europa City will be perfectly connected to both the main air gateway of France and its capital.
The developer of the project is the Auchan group, which initially relied on the creation of a multifunctional complex capable of offering its visitors something more than just a certain number of shops and entertainment centers. Actually, that is why the competition was held - the efforts of the architects were aimed at finding a new format open to innovations and bold urban planning experiments. The BIG project, recognized by the jury as the best, is characterized by its authors as "a hybrid of urbanism and landscape design."
Having given the new area the shape of an elongated triangle with rounded corners, Danish architects are solving it as a single megastructure, green inside and out. And if along the perimeter it is simply lined with trees, then its roof is a single lawn, due to which Europa city, when approaching it, will be perceived as a hilly valley cut by the rays of highways and boulevards. The center of the whole composition is the square of Europe Square, and the area itself is divided into five sectors, each of which is under the "jurisdiction" of a certain part of Europe.
So, in the Spanish sector it is planned to place a water park and an oceanarium, in the British sector - mainly offices, the French sector will be allocated for parks, cabarets and a conference zone, in Eastern Europe to build a circus, and in the Nordic countries - an artificial ski slope and a skating rink. In each of the sectors, the dominant function is supplemented by a multitude of accompanying ones - cafes and restaurants, shops, information bureaus - and, in principle, the division itself is conditional, since the "countries" are connected with each other by a developed network of roads, crossings and cozy pedestrian squares.
In general, the project paid close attention to public spaces: the architects strove for maximum comfort of the living environment, strictly observing the balance between the density of the building and the area of landscaping and landscaping.
