The Rout Lëns site, through its location and history, is a distinct urban condition. Shaped by the steel industry, the legacy that the urban project must now assume is both its strength and its weakness.
It is a “resilient” territory, and the future plan must turn this weakness into a strength.

Moreover, the project will emerge in an era defined by environmental requirements as well as by the expectations of a digital society. A new field of urban action is opening up to us, and it would be risky to try to invent the future using the tools of the past.

More than ever, the transformation of space and that of society must be part of the same movement.
This is an urban laboratory situation, as in other moments in the history of cities, and it is the public realm that must become the place where this dual spatial and societal movement is expressed.

We have identified three priorities capable of shaping a “spatial concept” and underpinning the urban design:

1. Imagining an avenue of industrial culture
As a first premise, we propose that industrial heritage—if it is to embody the future as much as the past—must be linked to a continuous, evocative route.
Conceived as the lifeline of the new district, we have given it a symbolic and provisional name: the “Avenue of Industrial Culture”.

2. Designing a stratified city
The urban form, developed in layers, must contribute to a territorial reading of the site. From ground to sky, each layer has a role, responding to specific needs and expressing part of the project’s identity.

3. Establishing a vegetal presence 
Nature is the inseparable counterpart to history
For a territory levelled by industry to be reborn, its design must orchestrate an act of vegetal resurgence. This is a necessary condition for inventing a liveable environment for our time.