In Paris, the history and the evolution of social housing provision merge with those of a centennial institution. Created in 1914, the Office Public d’Habitations à Bon Marché, currently called Paris Habitat, manages more than 1,200 operations, 120,000 housing units inhabited by 200,000 residents. This article reviews an investigation to this exceptional heritage commissioned by the Pavillon de l'Arsenal in Paris, which resulted in the exhibition and catalogue Paris Habitat: Cent ans de ville, cent ans de vie, presented by the institution in 2015. The investigation, exhibition and publication were organized around the analysis of ten fragments of reality that, rather than matching administrative divisions or urban planning projects, span municipalities, districts and infrastructures. From low-cost to large-scale housing, from concerns with hygiene to ecology issues, each one of the building ensembles analyzed bears witness to the will to change society through housing. Written by the project’s main curator and catalogue editor, this review details the process through which essential questions formulated early on – What is the city we want like? How is it built? – were answered to: selecting from the wealth of material produced by Paris Habitat over one hundred years of activity, the team exposed their political stance on urban strategies at large. Importantly, Paris Habitat’s ‘actions’ substantiated the team’s belief that our knowledge of this long, continuous urban experiment can contribute to improve the metropolises of today and strengthen its ability to answer contemporary concerns: the transformation of offices into housing, new residents’ participation formulas, new building and conception processes, which are key elements in the making of cities that need to be dense, diverse, intense, fertile and agile.@en

Our current cities are comprised of enclosed, distant and introverted architecture equally isolated from urban life and ecological context. How might we open these spaces? How might we introduce pockets of space capable of triggering social encounters, multiplying circulation and facilitating the introduction of flora and fauna? This book gathers the research conducted by The Why Factory into what we term ‘urban porosity’. Using both analogue and digital approaches, our researchers and students explored modes to open up our cities. What might be imagined to open our towers and city blocks? Stepped floors? Public stairways? Grottos in which city dwellers might meet? Could we manipulate building envelopes in order to increase façade area? Might we perforate built volumes and thus create pocket parks? Each of our hypotheses led to a series of step-by-step interventions that materialized in the form of a vast collection of towers built by our students using LEGO blocks. When gathered together, the resulting army of LEGO towers shows how far we can—and cannot—go. How much can a tower bend before it collapses? At what point does a porous tower become financially impossible to build or maintain? @en

Our current cities are comprised of enclosed, distant and introverted architecture equally isolated from urban life and ecological context. How might we open these spaces? How might we introduce pockets of space capable of triggering social encounters, multiplying circulation and facilitating the introduction of flora and fauna? This book gathers the research conducted by The Why Factory into what we term ‘urban porosity’. Using both analogue and digital approaches, our researchers and students explored modes to open up our cities. What might be imagined to open our towers and city blocks? Stepped floors? Public stairways? Grottos in which city dwellers might meet? Could we manipulate building envelopes in order to increase façade area? Might we perforate built volumes and thus create pocket parks? Each of our hypotheses led to a series of step-by-step interventions that materialized in the form of a vast collection of towers built by our students using LEGO blocks. When gathered together, the resulting army of LEGO towers shows how far we can—and cannot—go. How much can a tower bend before it collapses? At what point does a porous tower become financially impossible to build or maintain? @en

From the urgencies seen in contemporary societies and urban situations, it is obvious that it is time to begin thinking about our cities in completely new ways. The urban environment has become fundamentally different in many aspects, but we are still trying to physically define it in the same way as before. And we are almost paralyzed in what seems to be a splintered and contradictory reality. On the one hand cities and communities are highly individualistic and increasingly based on the individual unit, and on the other hand global connectivity and awareness is proliferating in almost all our daily activities. There is a need to find ways of bringing together these two extremities — the individual and the collective — from both ends and both conceptually and practically, into possible constructions.@en