Beyond the postcard

This contribution challenges the capacity of eco-neighbourhoods to transform the urban texture at its core. Thus, it uses Vauban (Fribourg-en-Brisgau, Germany) as a European case study. This neighbourhood is old enough to attempt reading its urban future. The hypothesis of eco-neighbourhoods as ecological avant-gardes at the cusp of a different way of making the city and making society (“the eco-neighbourhood, laboratories of a virtuous urbanism”) is discussed according to two different materials. The first is an iconographical reading of the landscape. The second, made of semi-directive interviews, comes in help of said iconographic analysis. They are both presented as hermeneutical descriptions. The article follows the thread of the mutation of the script – script of the good use of the city – inscribed within this portion of the city [read].