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Collectif Etc.

Collectif Etc. is a French design collective supporting urban experimentation and discovery. They maintain that the traditional construction of the city is vertical and hierarchical, dominated by politics and divided along professional lines, e.g. planners plan, architects design buildings, etc. By these activities occurring in prescribed ways and prescribed times, the results are rigid and unsatisfactory. Collectif Etc. wants to disrupt this vertical framework. Moreover, they believe that citizens have a role to play in shaping their city, and do not need to be confined to the role of passive recipient of a designer’s intent.

The group believes that involving the public in the design process as an equal contributor is essential to creating good public space. They have experimented with built works, but also with urban furniture, lighting devices, as well as organizing conferences and workshops.

Collectif Etc is perhaps best known for its Detour de France – a roving series of twenty projects conducted across France. They took a caravan on the road, stopping in multiple cities to execute projects. They would stay one to two weeks, and typically spend less than €2,000 at a stop. Collectif Etc collected most project funds as donations from the group’s relatives. Each stop was in itself a statement unto itself. The group reached out to other design collectives throughout Europe (including EXYZT and Atelier d’Architecture Autogeree) and stopped to collaborate with them. Detour de France was essentially a meta-project, where the group positioned themselves as interlocutors and germinators of a conversation about public space throughout France.