Europa City has its architect!

Europa*City, Auchan's huge 600,000 m² shopping centre with a €2 billion budget, has found its architect. The jury has just announced its decision. As a reminder, the architects began work on the project in April 2011, and delivery is scheduled for 2021.

The Dane Bjarke Ingels keeps adding to his competition wins around the globe. In France, he has won the extension of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, named Paris PARC, and the FRAC in Bordeaux. The Danish firm BIG, which made its name with the 8 House project, now takes on one of its largest commissions to date.

The programme

The project is organised around several worlds, each inspired by a different European culture. Visitors will be able to snowboard in the snow park, swim in the water park, and then unwind in the adventure park. In total, 170,000 m² will be given over to leisure. To this is added the economic engine of the centre: 230,000 m² of shops and services, or more than 500 stores. The project also includes 50,000 m² for culture, 10 hotels with a total of 2,700 rooms, and 100,000 m² of public space, all on an 80-hectare site.

Reinventing the shopping centre

The shopping centre built around a food retailer flanked by smaller shops is obsolete. The Mulliez family knows this, and has cultivated a taste for commercial innovation since the company's creation. It is from this observation that the project, combining retail and entertainment, was born. In 2006, Immochan, the property arm of the Auchan Group, began searching for land: Saclay, Orly, Versailles, Massy and finally Gonesse. Nicolas Sarkozy, won over and aware of the project's economic potential, then folded it into Grand Paris and gave it the momentum it needed to take root.

Today the challenge is to design a place where people can enjoy themselves while spending money; shopping must become a pastime rather than a chore one wants over with quickly.

Holidays for those in a hurry or on a tight budget

A few decades ago, ski resorts and Pierre et Vacances villages came into being. Today, the Auchan group is testing a new entertainment market aimed at the general public. The project combines a mini ski resort, a golf course, an aquatic centre, a circus and a cultural centre, so that everyone can find their own kind of recreation.

Will it be able to present itself as an alternative to holidays on a tight budget?

A conditional project

Auchan is not investing €1.7 billion without conditions. For its part, the EPA Plaine de France requires that the 80 hectares of farmland retain an agricultural, or at least green, landscape.

One of the main conditions for the project's feasibility was that it be served by the RER D in 2020 and the Grand Paris Express in 2025. That condition has now been met, as the Prime Minister announced on 6 March.

Economic stakes

This is above all an economic project. By coincidence, it is being built on the Triangle de Gonesse, directly opposite the PSA plant in Aulnay-sous-Bois. Europa City is expected to employ 11,580 people, with a further 5,975 indirect jobs. Before its delivery in 2021, construction will require 12,600 workers and create 6,300 indirect jobs.

In terms of footfall, Europa City is counting on 60,000 to 80,000 visitors a day.

Did you say culture?

One of its four commitments concerns culture: Europa*City is to include 50,000 m² of cultural space. Its presence amid the 500 shops may raise questions, but museums are not the only things that fall within the field of culture, perhaps to the client's delight. As you will have gathered, the atmosphere at Europa City will lean towards entertainment rather than the questioning that a work of art can provoke.

For Auchan, culture begins with a 10,000 m² circus. There will also be a 6,000 m² cultural centre aimed at children under 12. Next comes the Plug-in, a resource centre, in other words a space once again closer to a tourist office than to an exhibition hall. Another space called Kitchen 21 adds 5,000 m² of culture; the client describes it as a “genuine 'Made in Europe' artists' residency programme, bringing together creation, production, distribution, delectation and consumption in the fields of visual arts, digital arts, design, fashion, gastronomy and dance”. The cultural offer ends with two performance venues, one seating 2,000 and the other 500.

In the end, do we want culture in a place devoted to shopping, consumption and entertainment? Are commerce and culture not contradictory programmes? Besides, the Louvre-Lens is not so far away. Would you like to see works of art wedged between a nightclub and a bar, flanked by video game shops or lingerie boutiques? Obviously, it will not be quite like that, but it comes close.

Presented as a place of culture and green entertainment, Europa*City looks more like a temple to consumerism. Like any private project, it has to be profitable.

Timeline

Architectural design studies: 2013 – 2014
Public inquiries: 2014-2017
Start of construction: 2017
Completion: 2021

Architecture

Ultimately, in this competition, wasn't the most complex task to give a human meaning to this commercial machine?

I now invite you to view the winning project as well as the three other architects who were competing: