URBASTUDIOURBANISME & ARCHITECTURE

A discreet district of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bréquerecque lies on the margins — just behind the train station, a short walk from the city centre, along the banks of the Liane. A territory that is both enclosed and strategic. Shaped by its industrial past, the district now finds itself in suspension: the departure of BIC, the planned relocation of the fire station, vacant large sites, forgotten edges — all signs that a new narrative can take shape.

The district holds an urban fabric that is widely underestimated: small workshops and active industries, an associative recycling centre, workers’ houses, discreet green traces, waiting brownfields, rows of mature trees, views towards the basilica or the river… Bréquerecque is not “empty”, it is scattered — and it is this dispersion that the project aims to transform into continuity.

At the heart of this transformation stands a key catalyst: the large hall of the former BIC factory, a generous industrial structure able to host a new neighbourhood facility. Through its rehabilitation, it can become an open, shared space — cultural, productive, or community-oriented — a place of life capable of shifting the district’s image and giving it a true centre. A way to embrace its working-class memory while projecting it into new uses.

The project erases nothing; it builds on what is already there. Bréquerecque can once again become a productive district — but differently. A more sober, evolving urban fabric emerges from the existing. A city attentive to its context, woven from new alliances between housing, activity, landscape, and collective narrative.

The strategy is based on three major levers:

– reconnecting to the station and to the Liane through clear itineraries, requalified public spaces, and the recovery of a true riverside frontage;
– revealing the district’s discreet heritage and faubourg character by prioritising rehabilitation, adaptable housing and light productive forms;
– reactivating brownfields to host hybrid programmes, neighbourhood gardens and new everyday practices.

More than a fixed project, Bréquerecque becomes a trajectory: a gentle reconquest of a quiet faubourg that opens up, reconnects, and evolves through progressive activation, at a pace consistent with local capacities.