For more than 35 years, ILEX has been developing territorial visions, urban strategies and public realm projects across France and Switzerland, designing public spaces, parks, gardens and mobility infrastructures at every scale of the city.
Founded by Guerric Péré as a place for dialogue and experimentation around urban public space, ILEX has explored the role of urban nature since the late 1980s, convinced that living systems constitute one of the most powerful mediators and regulators of urban life.
In 2023, the practice entered a new chapter with a transition in governance. Nadia Herbreteau became President of the practice and Isabelle Vignolles Managing Director, leading a multidisciplinary studio of around thirty urban designers — landscape architects, architects, urban planners, designers, lighting designers and ecologists — supported by a board of eight long-standing senior collaborators.
Today, ILEX focuses its work on one central challenge: making cities more desirable, resilient and livable in the face of climate change, biodiversity collapse and growing social fragmentation.
As global cities seek new forms of local rootedness, the “global city” increasingly reinvents itself as a “15-minute city”. Public space becomes more than ever the support for everyday life, collective identity and social interaction, giving rise to new forms of peaceful, renatured and convivial metropolitan living.
Parks, gardens, streets, avenues and squares no longer constitute residual spaces between buildings but form a living network of urban commons. By revealing their latent potential, enriching their ecological functions and giving them renewed narratives, ILEX creates places of exchange, biodiversity and shared services that operate as ecosystems.
Rehumanising hyper-functional territories, regenerating degraded soils, restoring water cycles and reconnecting fragmented urban fabrics, the practice increasingly dedicates its energy to the regeneration and re-enchantment of anthropised landscapes.
Strongly committed to climate adaptation, ILEX develops the conditions for an urban nature that is both immersive and performative — supporting biodiversity while cultivating new forms of urban poetry.
Beyond the functional city, it is through this living and sensitive network of spaces that the practice accompanies emerging ways of inhabiting, creates new places to live and proposes new figures of urbanity.
Published on July 6, 2026
