project detail

The Boulevard de Cap-Haïtien is the city’s waterfront, essentially made up of asphalt roadway and sidewalks in poor condition.

It faces numerous problems: it carries access for trucks and heavy transport serving the port, it channels the town’s entire drainage, and it is a car-oriented space with no vegetation, built largely on land reclaimed from the sea in the 1960s.

Yet it holds great potential, in a city where the available open space is barely larger than it was in colonial times, even though the population has since multiplied more than tenfold.

The project also had to address climate-change resilience — specifically, rising sea levels. The proposal ultimately put forward involved an intelligent reuse of the existing coastal defences: a system of metal sheet piles protected by rockfill. It repositioned this rock armour strategically on the seabed according to the bathymetry, never going beyond a depth of 2 m, to create a buffer space — a resilient, coast-protecting strip — along the stretch between the port and the Deco Bar.

The proposal was flexible and adaptable to the donor’s final financial capacity, allowing the recovered space to range between 30 m and 80 m in width depending on available funding. In the most ambitious scenario, this would have created around 32,000 sqm of public space, reorganized the interface with the port, and created a resilience zone able to manage the stormwater runoff flowing down from the town while offering a resilient response to sea-level rise.

Unfortunately, this proposal was not taken up by the client, and the team decided not to proceed under partial and unjustified requirements.