Fortified town / Sustainable town

3 topics for reflection and critical thinking

· The Septentrion territory: to participate in the renaissance of a cultural territory via a shared appreciation of the history and heritage of its fortified towns and the creation of transnational engineering of sustainable towns.

· Heritage and the environment: to protect and enrich heritage and the environment through the creative management of cultural and natural resources, borne out of the transnational sharing of competences.

· Citizenship: to provoke inhabitants' involvement in the planning of their town, to develop a feeling of belonging to a European cultural region.

A living model of a European town
Our towns are compact. They are still defined by our city walls. We are now discovering that this asset, originating for military reasons, offers advantages in terms of town planning. Fortification engineers designed them wisely by capitalising on each site's natural resources. Sustainably developing our towns means drawing lessons from this original engineering and the developments that then ensued. It means allowing each inhabitant to appreciate this heritage to understand the place it occupies today and the role it will play tomorrow. It means comparing our past, observing the present and anticipating our future needs. It means allowing our urban engineers to confront their solutions and to share their expertise. From our exchanges, a transnational engineering programme on sustainable towns will be borne, that will be transferable on a European scale.