Station F is located in a former freight hall, the Halle Freyssinet.
Incubators and digital cities are springing up in every city in France. Several of them use the large spaces abandoned by the large industrial groups of the 19th century. Follow us for a tour of France.
Station F in Paris
Station F is the largest start-up campus in the world. The incubator is located in a 34,000 square meter building in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. It is located in a former industrial wasteland called the Halle Freyssinet. The place was a former freight hall built in the late 1920s by the French engineer Eugène Freyssinet. The architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte took on the task of rehabilitation.
Euratechnology in Lille
EuraTechnologies is located in an 80,000 square meter digital campus on the LeBlan-Lafont industrial wasteland in Lille (Nord). The building is “from the exemplary rehabilitation of two former textile factories Lafont and Le Blan built respectively in 1896 and 1900″, says the incubator. The factory filed for bankruptcy in 1989 and was taken over by the incubator twenty years later.
Hemera Hall in Bordeaux
On Rue Fondaudège in Bordeaux (Gironde), the Héméra incubator has moved into the former site of the aniseed-flavored liqueur brand Marie Brizard. The building was built in the 19th century in Eiffel style. The site had been left in disuse since 2008 ” following the relocation of the traffic machines in the Bordeaux suburbs “.
Rehabilitation began in 2017.
The Belle-de-Mai tobacco factory
Within the cultural pole of the Friche de la Belle-de-Mai in Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône), the Manufacture des Tabacs houses the start-up incubator. The three buildings, built in 1868 according to plans by Désiré Michel, cover 12 hectares. The factory was divided into three poles : the administration and the manufacturing workshops, a lot for the production and a third for the transit stores. The factory closed in 1990 when production was transferred to Vitrolles (Bouches-du-Rhône).
A digital city in Bordeaux
This digital hub in Bordeaux is being set up on 27,000 square meters in place of the former postal sorting center in Bègles, a district of the city. This mail processing center dates back to 1978 but closed in 2009 due to task empowerment. The architect Alexandre Chemetoff designed the new premises.
The first tenants of the project arrived in October 2018.
Lyon and H7
In Lyon, the incubator is located in an old boiler house dating from 1857. Formerly called Halle Girard,
it was renamed H7 when the start-ups moved in at the beginning of 2019.
Tours uses the Mame printers
It is in a former printing house Mame, that the start-up ” creative ” of Tours (Indre-et-Loire)
find. It was partially rehabilitated by the young Parisian architect Franklin Azz associated with Pierre-
Antoine Gatier to create the Cité de la création et du l’ innovation. The original site of the printing house has been destroyed
during the Second World War but was rebuilt in the 1950s. The building will be subject to
the first use in Europe of a prefabricated aluminium sheds roof.
KMØ in Alsace
KMØ are installed in the buildings B23 and B24 of the former foundry of the Société Alsacienne de
construction mécanique (SACM) in the center of Mulhouse (Haut-Rhin). The digital centre is located at
level of the point from which the distance to the city is calculated. ” A line between Mulhouse and Thann was
It was first inaugurated and served as the first test on September 1, 1839. The start of this line is located in the SACM building, renamed KMØ (kilometer zero) in 2014 “, explains the incubator. 11,000 square meters are dedicated to the new digital ecosystem in Alsace.
Article (incomplete) : SYBILLE AOUDJHANE source l’Usine Campus, published on 18/08/2019