Renewal of the town centre – CANDAS (Somme)
RetourCompletion year 1997
Contracting Authority Municipality of Candas
Mission Renewing the high street and creating a central square
Project Management Team Landscape architects and designers Laure Planchais (mandated agent), Consulting landscape architect and designer Jacques Coulon, Light designers Coup d’Eclat, Somme civil engineering services
Surface area 1.5 hectares
Budget €230,000 exc. VAT
Ratio €16 exc. VAT per m²
Candas is a small rural municipality whose identity is largely rooted in its former farming activity. The village went through unavoidable changes and was thus confronted to the gradual disappearance of its urban structure, which had relied on the wattle and daub farmhouses for its street facades. The vast lateral embankments lining the street front had led to too much recalibration of the main streets, giving them an open-road-like aspect which would disturb the notions of urbanity and centrality.
The project consisted in working on the embankments so as to restore pedestrian continuity by creating linear gardens alongside the housing, featuring a central path and plantations and made with the help of the residents, while the shopping strips were given a more urban feel by creating pavements and parking on quality mineral soil. Road safety and urbanity were reinforced by recalibrating the high street to more sensible dimensions and creating a pedestrian plaza that includes the town hall, the church, the school and the post-office, and by removing a street that was not very busy.
Feedback (last visit in 2008)
- The grassy embankments are gradually being overrun by a discordant variety of plants lacking any kind of overall logic.
- Part of the landscaping was destroyed when they created a mini-market (the path painfully ends at the unattractive rear of the building, and the adjacent embankment has been turned into an asphalt car park).
- The trees appear to have trouble growing.
- The house fronts where we had expected the locals to grow their own plants finally did end up being tended by the residents.
- The perennial plant flowerbeds did not last long. The linear plantations, which we included as an echo of the pretty vegetable patches one could sometimes notice in the backyards, were apparently not a success… the flowers were perceived as not being intense enough as compared to the annual plants used previously, and the aesthetics of vegetable patches were not quite “fashionable” at the time the project was designed!