Etienne Randier Fraile

After briefly studying geography, Etienne Randier Fraile graduated from Ensa Grenoble in 2015 before obtaining his HMONP (Master's degree in Urban Planning and Housing) in 2017.

During these years, he spent an exchange year at the Faculty of Architecture, Urban Planning, and Design in Montevideo, which proved to be a defining moment in his career. That year, he began research linking modest and informal human settlements, riverbanks, and climate hazards.

Since then, the relationship between socio-spatial inequalities and the consequences of climate change has been a constant theme in both his theoretical and practical work. His experience in architecture, landscape, and urban planning agencies, such as Axe-Saône architecture+paysage and Frys associés, and his collaborations as an independent architect have allowed him to pursue his interests and necessities to intervene at different project scales, such as his participation in the creation of a master plan in Saint-Laurent du Maroni in French Guiana. The desire to understand cultures of living, rooted in their territories, requires us to (re)think together the built and the living, water and earth.

In this regard, he recently completed his PhD in architecture entitled Les marges : territoires d'exploration du projet. L'habitat en situation d'incertitude par Montevideo (The margins: territories for project exploration. Housing in a situation of uncertainty by Montevideo). Carried out within the AE&CC Research Unit at Ensa Grenoble and supervised by Aysegül Cankat, this work enabled him to examine the geomorphological, historical, and urban dimensions that led to the transformation and creation of these riverbank and coastal margins, which today face significant combined climatic hazards. The essential steps involved were retracing the long processes of physical environment formation and metropolitan transformations, as well as the shorter processes of habitat creation.

These past, present, and future transformations are particularly examined by the representation tools that had to be updated in order to help develop project tools capable of proposing more targeted, common, and tailored transformations for these inhabited sites.