Urban Renewal: Retained Rail Tracks Turn a Sunken Railway Corridor into a Movable Public Ecosystem

Most proposals for abandoned railways treat the tracks as a memory to be paved over or framed behind glass. Urban Renewal keeps them working. The steel rails stay in the ground and carry movable timber modules, so the infrastructure that once moved trains now moves programme. A forgotten sunken corridor becomes a public landscape that can be rearranged, a site that changes its layout as the people using it change their needs.

Designed by Misak Terzibasiyan and shortlisted in the Salut Paris competition, the project takes its cue from La Recyclerie café, the neighbouring venue whose ethos of reuse and community runs through the whole scheme. The brief is a long, narrow cutting that sits below street level and was previously hidden behind barriers. Terzibasiyan answers it with three linked moves: retain the railway, organise the strip as a gradient from intimate to public, and fill it with a modular system that also works as a productive ecosystem.

Tracks That Carry Programme Instead of Trains

The two-storey timber pavilion shows the logic at its most domestic. Clothing racks spill onto the lawn for a flea market, a worker sweeps beside the recycling bins, and string lights turn the module into an evening destination. This is one of the temporary units, the category Terzibasiyan reserves for community programmes: workshops, flea markets and reading spaces aimed mainly at local residents and immigrants. Because these units sit on the retained rails, they can shift, cluster or clear away, which gives the site a temporal flexibility that fixed buildings cannot offer.

The recycling bins are not set dressing. Recycling areas are written into the programme alongside urban farming and fish farming, and placing them next to a second-hand market makes the café's ethos physical. Reuse here is a daily routine, not just a theme for the corridor.

A Linear Gradient from Café Intimacy to Open Stage

The site's narrow geometry could easily have produced a monotonous promenade. Terzibasiyan uses the length instead, layering functions along it so that privacy and activity change as you walk. Near La Recyclerie the spaces stay contained and quiet, supporting the café. Further along, the corridor opens into more public, interactive zones. The stage in these views sits at the louder end of that spectrum: a brass quartet plays under a slatted timber canopy, and students gather on wide concrete steps while a guitarist waits beyond.

The rose-covered trellis wall and the graffiti mural are two ways of softening the cutting's hard edges. The trellis belongs to the scheme's vertical gardening system, and the steps work as both circulation and seating, a reminder that paths here are designed to slow people down as much as move them through. The sequence mixes movement, pause and performance without hard thresholds between them.

Permanent Modules That Look Up to the Street

Against the temporary units, a set of permanent modules anchors the corridor and draws a wider audience that includes tourists. The cantilevered café balcony above the lawn path is typical: it stays put, gives the site a fixed point of reference, and offers a raised viewpoint. Viewing platforms in this permanent category link street level visually to the sunken site, which matters for a place that used to be invisible from above. Below, timber-clad market stalls line the path while a cyclist and a dog walker pass through, showing that the corridor also works as an everyday route.

Every module, permanent or temporary, is prefabricated in wood. The choice serves sustainability and cost efficiency, and it also makes phasing realistic: units can be added as funding and demand grow, so the project can start small and expand without redesign.

Opening the Cutting as a Working Landscape

The sloping lane between tall retaining walls captures the section that defines the project. The walls that once hid the railway now frame a shaded public street, lined with timber pavilions and strung lights, where people gather under tall trees. Greenery corridors, gravel pathways and permeable surfaces run through the site, helping regulate the microclimate, supporting biodiversity and letting water soak into the ground instead of running off. The slope itself does social work, leading people down from the city into the cutting rather than leaving it as a void behind a fence.

Add urban farming and fish farming to the vertical gardens and recycling areas, and the corridor becomes more than a park. It produces food, processes waste and hosts the community that runs these systems, putting the scheme within a regenerative approach to urbanism where public space also contributes to environmental resilience.

Why This Project Matters

Urban Renewal treats adaptive reuse as a functional system rather than a nostalgic gesture. By keeping the rails and giving them a new job, Terzibasiyan preserves the corridor's industrial history in a way people use every day. The split between permanent and temporary modules is the scheme's sharpest idea: stable attractions bring visitors and keep the site alive, while movable units give residents and immigrants space they can claim, rearrange and outgrow.

The proposal also takes the economics of public space seriously. Prefabricated timber, phased delivery and productive landscapes make this a project that could begin with a few units and build up gradually, which is how successful informal places like La Recyclerie tend to grow. For anyone working on leftover urban infrastructure, the lesson is clear: the most useful thing to keep is often the part of the structure that can still move.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Misak Terzibasiyan

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Urban Renewal by Misak Terzibasiyan Salut Paris (uni.xyz).