Bocage MetropolisLloyd Broda

Geneva has been early on preoccupied with its small territory and the way the city should expand into the countryside, especially once the fortifications were destroyed in the middle of the 19th century. The acknowledgement of both the need for a careful land-use and the value of parks, open spaces and the landscape was owed to influences such as Rousseau, Englishmen on their Grand Tour, the city’s taste for botany and natural sciences, and the relentless depiction of the Genevan landscape by local or visiting artists.

Geneva’s urban policy for these last decades (and the ones to come) has been strong inner densification, but at the increasing cost of open spaces near and within the city, while on the French side of the border, urbanisation has exploded haphazardly to keep up with the demand for housing.

The historic landscape type of the bocage genevois is where land is organised by variegated hedgerows mostly punctuated with oak-trees. By proposing the bocage as a model for Geneva’s growth, as well as a new ecology, we question the entrenched and specific relationship between the “city” and the “countryside.”

The bocage project consists of an overarching structure, the macrobocage, absorbing most of the new dwellings, activities and infrastructure; it frames tropes where public space and production are organised by a smaller bocage, the microbocage.