“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling.” Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900.

From the walker in the ordinary to Zone sweet zone

 After completing his architecture studies in Bordeaux, Yvan Detraz became an explorer in the summer of 1999, with a view to clearing up the suburban areas surrounding his city - before, let's not forget, the existence of Google maps. During this experience, which he describes as “initiatory”, he criss-crossed the metropolis off the beaten track, from Lormont to Floirac, from Gradignan to Pessac, from Blanquefort to Le Haillan. He sets off by the day on long, solitary walks, with the feeling of “opening new passages” in an area that seems to him to have been abandoned by architects. Suburban housing estates, derelict areas on the outskirts of collective dwellings, industrial wasteland, roads, bypasses and dead ends, as well as the great outdoors, high vistas and natural spaces, are all open to him without diversions. He mapped out his suburban routes and drew new lines on the ground, while collecting anecdotes from inhabitants intrigued by this walker in the ordinary, “who hasn't got lost, who doesn't have to be driven anywhere, but who makes the domestic and the banal a subject of study”, which formed the basis of his diploma the following year, as a first practical application.

Literature dedicated to the walk in everyday life sites was rare at the time, with the exception of the Manifesto on Current Territories, published in 1995 by the Stalker group after a circular walk of some 60 kilometers around Rome, and before that, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic (1967), in which the American artist Robert Smithson erected a series of objects and buildings doomed to disappear as “monuments”, and the writings of Walter Benjamin, in particular Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, published posthumously in 1940.

The publication in 2020 of Zone sweet zone1, the updated version of his diploma thesis, gave media coverage to Yvan Detraz's research. In this text, he analyses the qualities of the suburban environment and defends the possibility of creating a network of public spaces to structure the area, an act that “founded the practice developed by the Bruit du frigo collective”, of which the architect is one of the co-creators (1997). Since 2010, the peri-urban walks have been associated with eleven Refuges périurbains, “objects set in the landscape, somewhere between micro-architectures and works of art, designed to embody and encourage peri-urban itinerancy”. Le Nuage, Les Guetteurs and La Nuit Américaine, wich are immediately booked each month, enable almost 10,000 people a year —85% of whom live in the city and 15% who live further afield, in the Gironde, in France and abroad— to immerse themselves in the hospitable suburbs. As journalist Sébastien Gazeau explains: “modestly built, the refuges are nonetheless a field of experience whose depth is within everyone's reach. Early in the morning, with a numb back and a fresh nose, the hiker, now a philosopher, tells himself that the important thing is to be awake to the world around him, including the periphery.²”

Common ground

Fifteen years after the first walks, Yvan Detraz is updating the trails between 2017 and 2020 to stabilize the route. The Sentier des Terres communes isn’t entirely official, unlike the green loop launched by the metropolis at the same time as the Refuges périurbains (financed by Bordeaux Métropole and designed in collaboration with Zebra3/Buy-Self). The idea is “not just to link parks together. The prism of nature alone is not enough”. The 15 loops that can be downloaded from the trail's website are 300 kilometers long and consider “the sounds, the encounters, the questions that are part and parcel of these peri-urban walks”. The principle of loops means that you can return to your vehicle or a public transport station once the walk is over. Yvan Detraz set out to work on both “the A-sides of these routes, i.e. the preferred route with the must-sees on the way (woods, esteys, ruins, monuments, hillsides, viewpoints, lakes, etc.) and the B-sides, where you cross more ordinary landscapes that are just as important for embracing the realities of the suburbs (housing estates, shopping areas, ring roads, etc.)”. And the architect, who still organizes group walks from time to time, armed with a banner emblazoned with the Sentier des Terres communes crest and a megaphone so as not to lose the strollers, asserts: “You really must come to terms with the territory as a whole, and not avoid reality. Walking in the suburbs means accepting what is ordinary, being open and listening as you go”.

25 years on: international recognition
for peri-urban walks

Settled in front of the Garonne, on the benches of the fabrique Pola, of which Yvan Detraz is one of the founding members and “inhabitants”, it's time to take stock of what has happened over the last quarter of a century. “The way we look at the area has changed. My diploma research subject was an unthought-of topic at the School of Architecture. Most of the professors had a patronizing view of the suburbs left to the private sector. The individualistic culture of this area was judged negatively by the professionals.” The architect recalls that one of the only books on the subject was La ville émergente (Geneviève Dubois-Taine and Yves Chalas, L'Aube, 1997), the result of a seminar entitled “Urbanité périphérique, connaissance et reconnaissance des territoires urbains contemporains” (Peripheral urbanity, knowledge and recognition of contemporary urban territories), renamed and followed by the eponymous research programme. Since then, Yvan Detraz has noted that “society's view of the suburbs has changed, not least because this territory is particularly at stake today with growing ecological awareness”.

A second notable development is the change in practices, as demonstrated by the success of hikes and refuges. “They appeal to a very diverse public that goes beyond town planners, geographers and students. The goal has been achieved: to ‘normalize” these suburban walks and turn them into a territory like any other, just like hiking in the mountains. It's an important development; the practice is no longer seen as incongruous.” This change in attitudes has been accompanied by national and international recognition of urban walking, notably through the metropolitan trails network. The recent inauguration of the Greater Angoulême footpath shows how “this type of project always brings people together, around a shared narrative. It's a discourse that also works politically, by revealing the richness and values of the metropolitan area”, explains Yvan Detraz. In 2001, the Mouvement des chemineurs, supported by the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture et de Paysage de Versailles, brought together all European practitioners of walking. It was an opportunity for Yvan Detraz to meet Boris Sieverts, who has opened a trail in Cologne with his Büro für Städtereisen (Urban Travel Agency), and a fervent surveyor of the Paris suburbs, the architect Denis Moreau, who compiles his accounts of walking on the Banlieues de Paris website. “This recognition reached a peak in 2013, when Marseille became European Capital of Culture. The GR2013 trail became a major work of art, driven by the local scene of artist-walkers around Baptiste Lanaspeze”, who also published Zone sweet zone. In 2017, the association of metropolitan trails was born, and will be exhibited at the Mucem in Marseille until 2023, and at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal (Paris) in 2020.

Finally, in terms of teaching practices, surveying has become a widely accepted method of discovering a territory. “Sometimes it's even a teaching method or an end in itself”, warns Yvan Detraz. The Sentiers métropolitains have set up an Academy with lessons and resources that can be consulted online. Bruit du frigo regularly takes part in workshops. Among them, The Expéditions autour du milieu, in Saint-Médard-en-Jalles in 2016, which revealed the qualities and singularities of the suburban environment, highlighted, for example, by Inti Mani, who was amazed by the artificial fauna found in his survey area. The Chilean student drew up a poetic bestiary, which led to a lecture dedicated to plaster ducks, ceramic cicadas and other lions or eagles guarding gate stacks. As Yvan Detraz says, “the suburban environment is absolutely inexhaustible”.

25 years on: an increasingly fragmented
suburban landscape

The picture is not entirely rosy: “what hasn't changed at all, however, is the way in which urban planning in suburban areas is practiced. The city is becoming increasingly privatized. And the value of public spaces is still not understood. We have failed to preserve continuity on an inter-communal scale, and there is no framework of public spaces. Everything has become even more built-up, denser, enclosed and fenced off, and we are increasingly living in a city of fragments and discontinuities, made up of juxtaposed, zoned areas.” The preservation of ecological corridors and green and blue networks are now considered, but the design of these landscapes still lacks the integration of a continuous, structuring peri-urban public space capable of linking the juxtaposed plaques. “Yet such a space, open to use and appropriation by residents, could give rise to a sense of peri-urbanity.” The architect-walker notes with regret that “walking used to be more fluid. Now the fences are unambiguous. We're experiencing real enclosure. We continue to reproduce isolated neighborhoods, which is relatively logical, given that the private sector finances the public spaces.” He mentions the case of La Brazzaligne, a project for a landscaped walkway on a three-kilometer railway, linking a vast area lacking in pedestrian continuity: Parc de l'Ermitage, Parc des Coteaux, Bas Cenon, Brazza and Bastide Niel. It hasn’t not yet been builtwhile the new districts, relatively devoid of public spaces, are almost complete.

Yvan Detraz is no longer clearing paths that he has beaten repeatedly. With Bruit du frigo, his aim is to turn the suburbs into a project area by helping to create common ground in the world of the individual. In other words, he sees the suburbs as a place to invest in, a place to focus on, over and above the transformation of collective dwellings, which today seems to be the only subject for projects. While the Sentier des Terres communes offered a response in its time, the search for common ground is now being pursued with two “symbolic objects”: housing estates and the ring road.

The ring road covers between 4 and 500 hectares and involves 18 communes in the Bordeaux metropolitan area and their thousands of inhabitants. Yvan Detraz imagines it as a collective public space whose role in the decades to come needs to be questioned. Once again, the idea is not so incongruous, if we think, on a local scale, of the reclamation of the quays of Bordeaux at the end of the 1990s, which seemed impossible at the time. Or more distant examples of the recycling of obsolete suburban infrastructures, such as the transformation of the Elevado Presidente João Goulart motorway viaduct (better known as O Minhocão) into a pedestrian promenade on evenings and weekends since 1989 in San Paolo³; the development of the Cheonggyecheon waterway into a 6-kilometre-long promenade in the center of Seoul (Korea) after decades of motorway expressways (a project initiated in 2003); or the Catharijnesingel in Utrecht (Netherlands), a former canal that became a ring road in the 1970s, to be returned to its original state in 2020. The ring road raises an “imagination that is told on the scale of a metropolis, with a powerful potential”.

Taking the stance of a suburban activist, Yvan Detraz envisages a possible change of use through artistic installations that would establish a tipping point towards a “playful prospective, capable of clearing out its possible futures”. Its interstitial spaces (embankments, tunnels and technical footpaths that run around Bordeaux) could be diverted from their primary function and used to project ideas for the year 2050, just as the Panoramas Biennial was able to foreshadow the metamorphosis of the Parc des Coteaux on the right bank. After 25 years on the fringes of the metropolis, Bruit du frigo has now embarked on a new cycle of work, this time tackling a “highly visible” object, initiating a cycle of local actions and once again aiming to overturn the monopolistic status of the car. - Fanny Léglise, based on two interviews on 27 May and 10 June 2025.

^{1 Wildproject publisher.}

^{2 In Refuges périurbains. Un art à habiter, Wildproject, 2019 (in French).}

^{3 Its leisure use is increasing and it could soon be transformed into a park.}