City/Cité – The Art of Metropolitan Trails

From Bordeaux to Boston, Istanbul, Milan, Marseille, and beyond, metropolitan trails have generated a new creative space that lies at the crossroads of urban planning, art, tourism, and environmentalism. Mixing the urban with the cultural, these projects involve many aspects, ranging from the initial, collective attempts to develop them (scouting, city walks, and metropolitan hiking) to documenting them (through art projects, books, articles, travel journals, audiobooks, documentary films, and exhibitions), ultimately resulting in a collective itinerary created in conjunction with local authorities and communities. The exhibition The Art of Metropolitan Trails describes this emerging practice, renders homage to its pioneers, and explains how to create a metropolitan trail.

Exhibition created by the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Paris and Greater Paris Information, Documentation and Exhibition Center for Urban Planning and Architecture, 2020. Scientific curators: Baptiste Lanaspèze, founder of Wildproject Editions and initiator of GR 2013; Paul-Hervé Lavessière, urban planner and writer.

Free and open to the public. On exhibition from October 14-22. Join us for the opening on October 14 at 6pm!

Full exhibition schedule:

• Sat, Oct 14 | 6-10pm
• Sun, Oct 15 | 6-10pm
• Mon, Oct 16 – Fri, Oct 20 | 3-8pm
• Sat, Oct 21 | 10am – 4pm
• Sun, Oct 22 | 10am – 4pm

The Art of Metropolitan Trails is presented by Villa Albertine at the Atlanta Design Festival 2023. The exhibition is curated by the Bureau des Guides and the Metropolitan Trails Network, as part of City/Cité – Towards Earthly Cities.

About Metropolitan Trails

Metropolitan Trails are a new kind of public space. Rather than built infrastructures that reshape communities, they are social platforms designed to reconnect us to the land and to each other for a vital conversation on post-petroleum cities. Metropolitan Trails are an international urban innovation, born in France and Europe.

As part of City/Cité, a program presented by Villa Albertine, in partnership with France Atlanta and the Atlanta Design Festival, Atlanta is joining a network of cities like Paris, London, Istanbul, and Boston in reconsidering public space through urban trails.

About City/Cité – Towards Earthly Cities – Atlanta, Oct 11-22, 2023

City/Cité – Towards Earthly Cities (Atlanta, Oct 11-22, 2023) is a program inviting professionals from Atlanta and Marseille and the public to learn together about urban ecology and the future of our cities. Associate curator: Alexandre Field (Marseille).

City/Cité – Towards Earthly Cities is presented by Villa Albertine, in partnership with the Atlanta Design Festival 2023, France-Atlanta, the College of Design at Georgia Tech, the College of Environment + Design at University of Georgia, the Franco-German Cultural Center of Atlanta (Goethe Zentrum Atlanta + Alliance française d’Atlanta), Le Bureau des Guides, the Metropolitan Trails Agency, L’Ecole Nationale d’Architecture de Marseille, Friche la Belle de Mai, Finding the Flint and the Atlanta Creek League.    

Made possible with the support of the Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, the Institut français, Georgia Institute of Technology, the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (France), Métropole Aix-Marseille-Provence, the Ministry for Culture (France), Air France, Gene Kansas and Hyatt Centric Buckhead Atlanta.