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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.

Shifting Blueprint works with this legacy. The proposal is mitigating erasure via a productive remediation: a strategy that acknowledges the site's industrial past as a material and spatial resource, sequences the transformation so that each phase leaves the site more useful than it found it, and builds a renewed neighbourhood, focusing on working and living typologies, grounded in the specific identity of the Dunlopillo site rather than a generic urban programme.

The transformation in four phases

The transformation unfolds over four phases spanning twenty years. The first (0–5 years) opens the site to the public through temporary uses and targeted renovation, allowing the city to begin re-inhabiting it while initial decontamination starts. The second phase (5–10 years) carries the main deconstruction and decontamination effort, constructs the new workers' residential fabric, and establishes the underground parking. The third phase (10–15 years) builds the Magasins Généraux and Ateliers du Lac from salvaged materials and creates the primary landscape connections to the Seine valley. The fourth and final phase (15–20 years) completes the Grande Usine renovation and builds the Coopérative building, consolidating the site's identity.

The architectural expression maintains the industrial register of the site. Reuse is the guiding principle: steel structures from demolished halls form the skeletons of new buildings, facades combine salvaged and new brick, recovered wood and stone find their second use. New rooflines reference the iconic industrial sheds, preserving the quality of natural light and the particular atmosphere of the original buildings.

The proposal is structured around four pillars of transformation:
Recompose, Reconnect, Reinvest, and Remediate.

Recompose

The site's industrial identity is preserved and intensified, woven into a new urban fabric that hybridises productive and residential functions (from 50m² units for artisans to 1,500m² for mid-size companies) and encourages collaboration between private sector, educational institutions (UVSQ), and local associations.

Reconnect

New connections integrate the site into the city while prioritising soft mobility for residents. Logistics are concentrated on the northern half; general traffic is excluded and a 200-space underground car park serves the programme. Bus lines D and G are extended to the sitew while active mobility routes connect to existing networks. Two landscaped ecological corridors link the adjacent lakes.

Reinvest

Large areas are de-mineralised and new green continuities woven throughout the district. A fine network of public spaces supports diverse uses, from quiet relaxation and play to logistics and large-scale events. The interfaces with the lakes are activated with pontoons and a guinguette along the public paths.

Remediate

Polluted soils are managed on-site through bioremediation. Excavated earth is sorted: clean soil is revitalised for landscaping, contaminated soil treated and reused. Materials from deconstructed structures are salvaged and incorporated into new construction, managed from a central workshop in the renovated Usine des Communs.

This is a project that works with what is already there: the contamination, the industrial identity, the landscape of the Seine valley, the memory of a workers' city. Shifting Blueprint proposes not a fresh start but a coherent sequence of productive change: one that leaves the city of Mantes-la-Jolie with a neighbourhood that is genuinely its own.