Arts contemporains, urbanisme - Nicolas Tixier, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, ENSAG*, AAU_Cresson, 38000, Grenoble, France. * School of Architecture Univ. Grenoble Alpes
As an architect, the field addressed in my research, projects and teaching experiences questions what can be grouped together under the term “public thing”, which should be understood here not as a thing, but as a composition, “a theater of action as much as a society” (Isaac Joseph). My current work focuses mainly on the urban transect as a field practice, a technique of representation, and a project posture. Between heritage and fiction, I question territories and the way they are fabricated through ambiences (Tixier, 2023).
The transect consists of traversing along a given line. It presents itself as a hybrid device between a technical cut and a sensitive route. It is constructed by drawing, photography, measurement, text or video, as much as it is practiced in situ, mainly by walking.
As such, the transect enables urban planners, architects and landscape architects to articulate two postures that are usually dissociated: those of analysis and those of design. An important application of the transect in the late 80s was that proposed by New Urbanism, which made it a major design tool with operational rules for codifying the evolution of a place according to its forms (Andrés Duany, Sandy Sorlien, 2021).
The use of transect today mobilizes many disciplines and representation techniques. In its applications, the transect borrows form the inventory its ability to locate and collect the most diverse situations, and refers to Aby Warburg's mnemosynic atlases and Carlos Ginzburg's indexical paradigm, where the passage from the plan to the section line enables the city to be deployed in its social, environmental, historical and projectural thickness. In Deleuzian terms, we see it as the symbol of an approach to the city through the milieu .
The transect can easily become a collective practice, a work space that can be shared and amended between the players in a territory - residents, experts, but also decison-makers, and designers. Between the grand, historical narrative of a city or territory and the pragmatic micro-narratives of use, the transect offers a performative narrative tool for capturing urban situations and ambiences, and thinking about those of tomorrow.
The practoce of the transect is also relatively common in the artistic field, particularly for those working on the urban environment. Among the many possible examples are Edward Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), Gordon Cullen's Townscape (1964), Robbert Flick's Sequential Views (1980-1986) and Philip J. Ethington's Ghost Homes (2001), as well as post-situationist artists using walking in their work such as Francis Alÿs, Laurent Malone, Hendrik Sturm and the Stalker collective.
The transect potentially appears as a power to decontextualize, as the elements it mobilizes do not belong to predefined categories and the exchanges it provokes. It also offers an implicit critique of current urban productions such as zoning, by putting local singularities and inhabitant practices back at the center of the debate, in order to better grasp what exists and work on the future of places through and with their inhabited environment, in a way.
Cite this item: Nicolas Tixier, “Urban Transect”, translated by Laure Fernandez, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2025, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/849107/
