✊ With River Solidarity, the Riverhood team considers the Seine as a basin of socio-environmental solidarities to be revealed, connected and activated. Walking the territory and sensory mapping become methods for interweaving observations, sensations, everyday narratives and ecological systems, moving beyond sectoral perspectives and administrative boundaries. The team explores these solidarities in three dimensions - longitudinally, from upstream to downstream; laterally, between the river and its banks; and vertically, between the surface, soil and subsoil - combining a poetic understanding of the river with a grounded analysis of risks and socio-environmental inequalities. In the face of floods and heatwaves, mapping thus becomes a tool for revealing existing relationships and resources, often barely visible or disconnected, and identifying the conditions for activating them, from the local to the scale of the river basin.

🌊 With The Springing River-Garden Metropolis, the Flow team takes as its starting point a ‘mummified’ Seine, constrained by infrastructure, uses and representations, to question the relationship between nature and culture. At the heart of their approach, a water literacy matrix explores different scales - from the gardener to the river basin - through narrative, policy and design. This evolving framework brings analysis and imagination into dialogue to envision a river-garden metropolis where the ‘gardener’ refers not so much to a person as to a way of acting with one’s environment: humans, more-than-humans, water and institutions can all participate in caring for the territory. By ‘mythologising’ the river, the team seeks to shift our imaginaries and open up other possibilities. Under the banner of ‘pirate ecology’, it explores different transformations: reorienting port infrastructure to reconnect food production and consumption at the basin scale, or imagining cemeteries, through flooding, as habitats for a multitude of living beings. These are all ways of mending, rather than widening, the fractures between the metropolis and the living world.

🪢With Giving Space, the Confluencers team proposes to ‘make room’: for water and its cycles, but also for different uses, initiatives and residents’ involvement. One image guides their thinking: moving from a metropolis conceived as a knot, where challenges and regulations are so tightly intertwined that it becomes difficult to act on one without affecting the others, to a more flexible net, where different threads can flow and meander. Rather than erasing what already exists, the team seeks to loosen existing frameworks and open up spaces for residents to take action. ‘Laboratories’ - including a Water Assembly, flood streets, new uses for industrial riverbanks and shared spaces - provide ways of testing these transformations locally and imagining how they might circulate across the river basin. ‘Making space’ thus becomes both a spatial and collective approach: giving more room to the river and living systems, while creating the conditions for residents to shape and care for their environment.

Beyond their differences, the three projects invite us to look differently at the Seine and the territories it flows through, questioning the models that shape their development. Taking liveability as a horizon means connecting local experiments with broader transformations: rather than seeking to control the river, the teams explore how to work with its rhythms, strengthen the connections it creates and make room for experimentation.

In doing so, they shift not only what we plan, but also how we make projects. Building new relationships between water, living beings and the metropolis means creating the conditions for them: experimenting with methods, tracing trajectories, bringing together different forms of knowledge and experience and, beyond interdisciplinary dialogue, learning to shift our frameworks of thought and ways of working – to ‘undiscipline’ ourselves and open up new possibilities.