The official website of the Communauté Urbaine de Nantes

This is a town that knows how to turn things around.
Once upon a time, Nantes was the city of shipbuilders. But the shipyards closed on the town’s huge island, Ile-de-Nantes, in 1986. Since then, the only thing happening on the industrial brownfield was the wind blowing the weeds around. 

That is, until 2001, when the wasteland became Europe’s biggest inner-city construction site. 

Death of the dockyards gave Nantes the chance to reinvent itself. A score of architects have broken ground on new housing, commercial space and public-service edifices, all at once. A drive through the area (it’s too big to walk) takes you past public works rising beside schools going up amid housing units. Two hundred thousand sq. meters of office space will be added by 2015, and that’s just a start. TV networks and biotech outfits have set up. Tomorrow they’ll be joined by higher-education institutions, a hospital, parks, a marina and doubtless businesses that haven’t even been invented yet, for the project is set to go another decade at least. Two new bridges will link it to the mainland. And you’ll be able to view it all from the top of a giant elephant. That’s right, an elephant ; for they’re also planning a theme park, with a 15-meter powerdriven pachyderm as one of the rides.
The fever has spread to all parts of Nantes, where today building cranes call Shanghai to mind. What’s striking about the new Nantes is that it has clearly not been conceived from a single office. Some projects are as different as night and day but together they form a harmonious whole, guaranteeing the city a unique personality, not one popped out of a mold. At the same time it’s bringing innovative answers to the questions of multiculturalism, urban sprawl and the environment, proving that a city’s renewal and its growth don’t always have to be incompatible.



The new city has not been conceived in a single office.
Take transportation, a local specialty. The city has fallen in love with public transport, and encourages alternatives to the automobile such as trams, ecofriendly buses and river shuttles. Nantes now has France’s longest tramway network. You can ride a water bus from the railway station to the trade show at the International Exhibition Center, or home from work at night. 

Working collectively in a culture of innovation has catapulted Nantes to its place as one of Europe’s most dynamic cities. Its problem now might be that nobody’s leaving.