Experimenting images : Disclosing a social housing area through 3D virtual model

HTP3D is a three-dimensional virtual model of the housing area of Hautepierre, in Strasbourg (France), fruit of a collaborative work of artists, anthropologists and inhabitants. It shows trans-disciplinary actions and researches within the context of the project « Hautepierre is 40 years old», which aims to introduce different images and the complexity in this area suffering from many stereotypes. Since one year, HTP3D is accessible via internet as well.

Through HTP3D Hautepierre moves outside its physical borders and gives a complex image of itself : continually fed by artists, researchers, social science and architecture students with texts, videos, sound montages, virtual and imaginative architectures, drawings..., it often recalls the mobilities within the area, mobilities which are denied by the urban renovation. The project's aim is to make Hautepierre accessible to exterior view, but also to give the inhabitants access to experimentation and participation to a new plastic image of their place of living. Different social groups are concerned, but mainly the youths (the most stigmatized group) are interested in these virtual spaces. Also, HTP3D helps to the re-appropriation of the public space of Hautepierre.

Everyone can take part in the virtual construction of HTP3D, participating to different projects or, through a system of chatting, by living traces in the space and taking part to this common writing of memories and images of Hautepierre. This work questions the relation between virtual universe and physical places as well as their possible mutual impacts. Could the virtual space HTP3D, artistic and virtual model of a social housing area, populated by numeric images, influence our perceptions of physical places ? Or our idea of these places ? Or even future constructions within this neighbourhood? HTP3D aims also to assert that each urban project cannot be built without a strong knowledge of the context.