Grand Paris Express and cultural venues

With the construction of 205 km of automatic metro lines by 2030, the Grand Paris Express (GPE) will transform the metropolitan geography, it's practices and image. What will the interactions be between the GPE, the new public transport network and the cultural sites both existing and to be created? What place will be given to culture in the new station neighbourhoods? What leverage can be expected from the GPE?

In 2014, Apur contributed to these ongoing debates by undertaking a cartographic study of the existing and planned cultural locations within the vicinity of GPE stations in partnership with the Société du Grand Paris and  the Ile-de-France Regional Department of Cultural Affairs.

The places targeted are cultural venues open to the public : libraries and media-centres, cinemas, museums, exhibition spaces, performance venues, leisure centres, hybrid spaces, higher education institutions linked to cultural pursuits, as well as the elements of national heritage accessible and visible to the public as an integral part of the cultural landscape. The GPE project has mapped cultural locations on three different scales : the metropolis, the new metro lines, the station neigbourhoods.

The challenges and problematics on different scales work together : the metropolitan grid, the progress and programming of venues, conditions for public access, possibility of new collaborations, planning and development, the relationship between a station and the area surrounding it, directional signage and convenient itineraries between the station and the venues.

This work forms a pool of knowledge and a tool for defining and implementing shared cultural policies built upon existing structures. In view of the complex cultural dynamics at work in the territories, the cultural landscape is richer and more diverse than the proposed maps in this corpus of data, but the mapping approach of cultural venues open to the public is an essential first step to describing it more accurately.

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