Shifting blueprint

The Productive Remediation of the Dunlopillo Site

2025
Mantes la jolie - FR
Europan 18

Program: Urban strategy, industrial conversion
Area: 11 ha
Team: Despo Panayidou
Status: Competition

At the heart of Mantes-la-Jolie lies a sleeping giant: the former Dunlopillo factory. This preserved industrial universe, currently a fallow brownfield, is a testament to a bygone era of productivity that shaped the city’s identity and imagination.

Today, the site stands as an urban enclave, its skeleton of buildings and machinery a relic of industrial glory, accompanied by a remnant of a workers’ city to the south. It is a highly polluted, mineral island, disconnected from major urban routes and the beautiful landscape of the Seine valley and its lakes.

Schifting blueprint envisions not an erasure of this past, but a productive remediation, a sober, responsible, and local revitalization that builds upon this unique legacy.

The goal is to transform this site into a new destination founded on its identity, heritage, and existing resources; a place where productive development and quality of life merge to form a creative, accessible, active, and landscaped neighbourhood for all residents of Mantes-la-Jolie.