LA SUCRIÈRE: AT THE HEART OF LYON CONFLUENCE

An ambitious plan for Greater Lyon
The biggest city-centre development project in Europe, Lyon Confluence covers 150 hectares of the city’s southern Presqu’île (peninsula) area, extending to the very tip, where the Rhône and Saône rivers meet. Equal in area to the rest of downtown Lyon from City Hall to Perrache station, the project has a triple ambition:
- to open up this area and extend the current city-centre
- to bring water and the natural environment into the city by landscaping the riverbanks
- to create a varied, balanced, sustainable city in which housing, offices, shops and cultural and leisure facilities all have their place.
Lyon Confluence will be a means for all residents to reappropriate a remarkable site in the heart of the city.

The Confluence: a place worth visiting
Here Lyon has conquered its rivers. The Rhône and the Saône border this magnificent locale for natural extension of a city already part of the Unesco World Heritage listing. A marriage of land and water, of industrial and harbour traditions: truly a place worth visiting.

2009: the first projects by outstanding designers
Major facilities and institutions, generous public spaces, high environmental quality housing, media and communications companies: this first phase, the work of international architects and designers, is already under way.
Jean-Michel Wilmotte, Coop & Himmelblau, Christian de Portzamparc, Georges Descombes, Latz & Partner, Tania Concko and Clément Vergely – together they are shaping a city for all, a place that will be good to live in.

Cultural terrain
Once a land of toil, the Confluence is now converting its industrial buildings into cultural venues for the general public: events like the Biennial of Contemporary Art have moved into La Sucrière on the banks of the Saône, and further south the Confluence Museum, situated at the meeting point of two great rivers, is going to be a major cultural site focusing on science and society.

www.lyon-confluence.fr