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First Deployment in Southern France: Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille

Site Overview
Friche la Belle de Mai, a former tobacco factory converted in 1992, is now a major cultural and creative hub in Marseille. The site covers 45,000 m² and hosts:

  • 70 resident structures and 350 creatives

  • Nearly 600 public events annually, with 450,000 visitors

  • A wide range of public amenities, from gardens and a rooftop terrace to performance spaces, a bookshop, and exhibition halls

Located in a highly urbanized, working-class district (92% built-up), the Friche plays a vital role as multifunctional public space in an area with minimal green infrastructure and pronounced heat island effects.

Governance & Mission
Operated as a Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif (SCIC), Friche combines public and private stakeholders, advocating urban transformation, ecological redirection, artistic innovation, and community engagement.

A Turning Point: Climate Adaptation & LaboFriche #5

The 5th edition of LaboFriche (October 14. 2024) focused on urban water management, under the theme:
“From Funnel Cities to Sponge Cities”.

Key participants included:

  • Perrine Prigent (Deputy Mayor of Marseille) – Resilient city strategies

  • Nadine Florence (GEMAPI, Aix-Marseille Metropolis) – Desilting potential

  • François Roberi (Agence de l’eau) – Support for network disconnection

  • Marie Caroline Vallon (Région Sud) – Cross-fertilization of CARDIMED demonstration sites

  • Stéphane Manildo (40 Rain Thieves project) & Audrey Devedeux (Jeune Chambre Économique) – Artistic and community-based ecological approaches

This meeting marked the beginning of collaboration between Friche and the CARDIMED Demo 5 team.

Site Visit & Knowledge Exchange

A follow-up visit on October 18, 2024 to the Saint Jérôme campus, hosted by AMU (IMBE), Région Sud, and SEMIDE, involved:

  • Technical discussions with Friche staff on material and plant selection

  • Reflections on irrigation and plant cover management

  • Exploration of instrumentation methods for replication at the Friche

The “Friche Refuge du Vivant” Project

The Friche team is now launching a transformative ecological project focused on desilting and renaturation, involving 3 key sub-sites:

  1. Champs de Mai

    • Micro-forest (participatory planting)

    • Network disconnection, desilting

    • Restructuring of shared gardens, new educational area

  2. Place des Quais

    • Creation of a wooded park

  3. Cour Jobin

    • Full renaturation of the courtyard

This project won the “Pionnier du Climat 2030” award at the Climate Chance Summit (April 2025, Marseille).

Looking Ahead: Scientific Collaboration & CARDIMED Tools

The partnership includes scientific backing from:

  • Véronique Massotti and Lola Czuckerman (IMBE/AMU)

  • Marie Caroline Vallon (Région Sud)

This collaboration paves the way for integrating Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) and sharing CARDIMED project tools with broader, more culturally engaged audiences.

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