Villandry’s inhabitants try their hand at participating in the landscaping project

ISSUES workshop

After watching a video on the landscape trails, participants were asked to form groups of 6 to 8 people each and create maps of issues involved and places where action was required in the municipality; results were then pooled. 

Following the workshop, the team of landscape architects/researchers formalised its conclusions in a summary map and drew up an activation plan in preparation for the design phase (document downloadable from the initiative’s website). 

ACTION workshops

Basing itself on the document drafted by the team, the first workshop focused on the task of "Dynamising and restructuring the centre of Villandry". 

Students from Angers landscaping school (Agrocampus Ouest) divided the event up into 4 sub-workshops providing light-hearted ways of clarifying the project’s intentions with regard to the task in question:  

• “Pictures and words”, which aimed to come up with a definition of an ideal village centre through pictures and words.
• “Living centre(s) and shoestrings”, which focused on the question of travel within the municipality: areas most frequented, routes most taken and new connections to be created in Villandry over the coming 10 years.
• “Puzzl’andry”, which sought to define (keeping the same 10-year timespan in mind) the amenity centres to be created in the municipality in such areas as public services, shopping facilities, leisure activities and tourism.
• “Five actions for a project”, which invited participants to imagine what changes might be made to Villandry’s built-up and non-built-up areas through five actions: Creating, Destroying, Upgrading, Transferring and Stimulating.

The second workshop was designed to inform participants on the project’s “intentions” as mapped out in the first workshop, so as to then define together what concrete actions had to be undertaken to accomplish the task and portray them in plan view and then in perspective. 

Emphasis is put on the sense of community that the initiative inspires – a major factor in ensuring continuing commitment on the villagers’ part without causing any diminution in the quality of work carried out. 

On the web:

• Villandry paysage

On this website:

• Landscape trails in Villandry
• Landscape and participation

The action research programme underway in Villandry is part of the PDD2 (Paysage et Développement Durable – Landscape and Sustainable Development) programme, the proceedings of whose midway seminar have been published. 

Download:

• Proceedings of the PDD2 programme’s midway seminar