The urbz office in Paris combines expertise in participatory processes, storytelling, and creative production to help local governments, planning agencies, and communities reveal a place’s potential and imagine futures together.

Our collective, which includes urban planners, architects, anthropologists, artists, and filmmakers, is multilingual and international. We work across France and Europe, in collaboration with a variety of institutions, experts, researchers, and universities. We work with clients and on independent creative projects.

We believe that residents and users are the main experts in their neighbourhoods. Their daily experiences constitute essential knowledge for architecture, planning, urban development, and public policies.  

Each place is imbued with unique knowledge, stories and memories: about its geography, its economy, its built and natural environment, its history. It is an “Invisible Archive”: an intangible heritage, known and shared by the inhabitants and users of a neighbourhood or place, and a key resource for developers, town planners, architects, and communities involved in urban transitions. 

Our work as consultants uses ethnographic research, mapping exercises, interviews with residents, and participatory workshops to reveal a place’s potential and facilitate urban planning processes and programs for placemaking. 

We use experimental fiction as one of our tools to imagine the future of places together, employing creative and participatory storytelling to produce videos, films, installations, and editorial projects.