On Friday, the 1st of February 2019 at L’Alcazar in Marseille, Winy Maas, co-founder of the Dutch architecture and urban design office MVRDV, and director of The Why Factory, the thinktank on the future city at the Technical University in Delft, presented The Grand Puzzle, a 1200-page interdisciplinary pre-biennial research study of Marseille and its metropolitan region. The findings included analyses of the city through interviews and spatial data, and based on this, suggestions for possible urban interventions.

Receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from the local, national, and international community, the next step is for the study to be contextualized, analyzed, and refined as it becomes a tool for Marseillais to imagine possible futures for their city. The Grand Puzzle will also then serve as an inspirational tool to build on while developing artistic and cultural interventions before and during the biennial which will take place throughout the Marseille region between the 7th of June and the 1st of November 2020. Following the successful introduction of this model in Manifesta 12 Palermo, this is the second time that Manifesta has commissioned an urban study with the purpose of putting the city itself on a stage, fusing various disciplines, and aiming to weave the next stages of Manifesta deeply into the tissues of Marseille society.

The study offers a reflection of the city’s current situation in comparison with other cities. It reveals its specificities, its possibilities, its necessities, and its complexities; forming a “portrait” of the “Grand Puzzle” of Marseille. Deriving from these findings, a number of spatial interventions are suggested, illustrating a path for potential solutions and directions. Ultimately, The Grand Puzzle is a tool for citizens to rethink the potential of their city and its surrounding area. It is structured in 9 chapters with the aim to guide the reader in the discovery of the “Grand Puzzle,” without aspiring to claim a fixed conclusion or single simplistic view of this complex city. The ambition of the study is to highlight the potentialities of the city and its metropole and to put these in a European perspective – finding the themes that echo the critical issues Europe and Marseille face today.

The Grand Puzzle is designed not only to leave a tangible legacy for Marseille but is also intended to create discussion about the future of the city while serving as a basis for the upcoming Manifesta 13 architectural intervention. The forthcoming intervention represents a new model to visualize the ideas of the urban research study into a material form. It will be developed in the next few months and opened this spring as a symbol of unlocking the potential of the city of Marseille in collaboration with – and catering to the needs of – the citizens of the Marseille metropole.