A Shared Cooking Space to Promote Social Inclusion : The Tast’in Fives Project in FCB redevelopment

   Fives-Cail is a former major engineering plant in Lille which is being re-developped by Lille Metropole, according to new urban lifestyles. The new redeveloped site offers qualitative working and living spaces which are more energy efficient.

   The Fives-Cail project covers a 25 hectares site, including 17 hectares of brownfields that were occupied by FCB which produced major engineering works such as the Eiffel Tower’s lifts or the boring machine to dig the Channel Tunnel.

   As this site is very well located and in one of the poorest districts of Lille, Lille Metropole, in partnership with the City of Lille have decided to commit in this metropolitan urban project and to address its social, environmental and economic challenges.

   The major idea of this project was to avoid urban sprawl thanks to the redevelopment of already existing but abandoned urban spaces and to design a sustainable eco-district. This eco-district associates 1200 housings, including social housings, public amenities, activities, shops and convenience stores and an international hotel school.

   All local stakeholders, such as economic actors but also creators, citizens, collectivities and associations have been regularly involved in the designing of the urban project. Lille Metropole assigned the operational realisation of the urban project to its public/private urban development company SORELI. The project has been funded by the French Governement and the European Union (ERDF).

   Within the framework of this urban re-development project, the city of Lille has implemented Tast’in Fives, one of the 1st Urban Innovation Action project which promotes social inclusion through food, concentrating in the same place cooking, productive and food-services activities. This « community kitchen », designed as a tool for sharing, mixing people of different cultures and empowering them, is now a place to gather for the simple pleasure of cooking,..

   This innovative community center provides a shared space to socialize, named Chaud Bouillon. There people may cook, eat, meet and make new experiences (including an audio-visual studio and a vertical agriculture demonstrator). Workshops are organised, mostly against waste and malnutrition. Chaud Bouillon is made of 4 complementary spaces: the foodcourt, the shared kitchen, the urban farm and the professional kitchen.

   This space creates a virtuous ecosystem of training and job opportunities: crash courses and meeting with employers on the one hand, restaurants and food processing activities on the other hand. The professional kitchen also hosts Baluchon, an incubator that helps create entreprises in catering services. In a 230 square meters shared lab dedicated to cooks and entreprises, Baluchon offers to accompany the development of professional projects around food and cooking. A social caterer also prepares homemade recipes with local productions, training unemployed people to help them access catering professions.

   Most part of the innovation lies within the fact that, contrary to the usual public equipment, this inclusive kitchen responds to an original collective governance. Furthermore, it is financially autonomous while receiving part of the benefits from private activity operating in the vicinity.