| Summary: | At the beginning of the 1980s, the political, economic and social events which took place in the city of Nîmes contributed to a redefinition of its urban planning system. With the project baptised ‘The Nîmes experiment, towards a city without suburbs’, the local authority, run by Jean Bousquet (mayor of the city from 1983 to 1995) tried to find a new way of thinking about its development and about improving its image for the coming years. The goal of the planners and other players in the field was to unify a city divided by zoning whilst preserving the identity of the territories composing it. The project sought to encourage collaboration between urban planers, architects, designers and artists in order to create a sort of open-air urban museum, redesigning public spaces and restoring heritage buildings. These reflections on urban planning are based on the idea of rediscovering a kind of ‘art of city-building’. However, despite a clearly affirmed will to bring about change, the work carried out in the urban space of Nîmes, inspired by received ideas of the character of different neighbourhoods, did not lead in the end to a real reunification of the city. The project even had the opposite effect of reinforcing imbalances between the city centre and the periphery.
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