Castle Hill, a park found

With the strong presence of nature on the very margins of a city with such a particular topography, with the omnipresence of the sea or the mountains wherever the eye is, Nice is more than a city: it is a garden city, a city-landscape.

In fact, its contrasts of forms and moods between a densely constructed hyper-centre and reliefs where the city blends into the mineral and the plant make it a singular laboratory of the encounter between city and nature: two environments that are often opposed to each other, but which are nevertheless able to invent a common destiny precisely through this encounter.

Already on the occasion of the opening of the Promenade du Paillon, the City of Nice, through the Forum of Urbanism and Architecture, had highlighted the issue of landscape creation in cities with an exhibition entitled "The Fertile City". Fourteen projects in France and Europe illustrated how interpretations each time renewed the idea of nature can inspire today the very drawing of the city.

We could also see how the notion of landscape has now gone beyond the simple romantic idea of natural panorama, to initiate new crossovers with architecture and development and thus enrich urban projects capable of meeting the challenges of increasingly complex cities.

This exhibition, dedicated to the redevelopment of the Castle Hill Park,is an opportunity to continue this reflection. We discover the ability to rediscover the spirit of the places of such a rich and symbolic site, as well as to achieve a new balance between nature and history, between heaven and earth, between memory and creation.

The approach developed around this public park project is to find and magnify an "already there" historical and landscape, but also another "already there", made of memories of inhabitants and uses passed down from generation to generation. It thus illustrates how the landscape is more than a word or an idea: it is both the place and an instrument of (re)conciliation between citizen aspirations to develop new conviviality and to reappropriate the city, to recreate roots there - as the plant does precisely.

From the origins of the site to its historical evolution, from the observation of uses but also of today's problems to their resolution by a project both contemporary and rooted in memory, this exhibition is a journey that anticipates what will be possible tomorrow on this "new hill".

Free entry