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FUTURA BOLD?

Festival d'Architecture 2013

Having been witnessing incomparable economic, demographic, social, cultural and environmental transformations since the beginning of the last century, Luxembourg, given its relative size, stands as a perfect case study and test ground for the spatial anticipation of today’s global challenges.

Luxembourg’s day-to-day politics, its social benefits and services are upheld by its current prosperity. A prosperity that has first been produced by the steel industry, and since the 1970’s is exclusively benefiting from the financial service sector. Both sectors have been relying on continual growth in order to maintain Luxembourg’s lifestyle: growth of the population and growth of labor force.

Yet this growth related prosperity is also founded on the principle of consumption: the consumption of raw materials, of goods and of land. A principle that is evolving in sharp contrast to the finite resources the country has to offer. 

If we do not wish to give up the concept of welfare state, a central element of Luxembourg’s contemporary society, we need to reassess it. The way we organize the country’s territory and qualify its spaces will (need to) be a key element in this quest for sustainably maintaining this prosperity.

We will need to constructively induce a paradigm shift:
From the consumption of- to the production by- the territory!
For that Luxembourg’s prosperity will no longer solely rely on import and the unstructured exploitation of local resources, but will instead stem from an optimized production supported by a synergically organized territory.

Yet production will not necessarily come under the shape of smoking furnaces: optimized production can be anything from agriculture boosted by greenhouses to small scale high-tech manufacturing…Anything that can be consumed should be produced as locally as possible. Space and territory must thus be turned into a tool and asset enabling such productions while simultaneously guaranteeing a high quality of life!

In the light of emerging, citizen-driven initiatives concerned with Luxembourg’s future, this year’s architecture festival, entitled FUTURA BOLD? aims at specifically stimulating the broader public debate and focus on space and territory, by pro-actively investigating the status-quos and constructively reacting to it.

FUTURA BOLD? is the product of a consecutive line of participative events and reflections launched in 2009 by the Fondation de l’Architecture et de l’Ingénierie and its working groups under the general theme “Visions pour notre Territoire”.