“Making Dijon a global center for the French art of living” : for François Rebsamen, PS mayor of the city for twenty years, it is not a small ambition that the International City of Gastronomy and Wine (CIGV) has, which opens its doors on May 6th. It is a real city within a city of 6.5 hectares, developed by the Eiffage group, which has just come out of the ground after five years of work and an investment of 250 million euros, to which must be added 15 million funds public. Ultimately, the City aims to accommodate “one million visitors a year”.
Dijon is one of four local authorities – along with Lyon, Paris-Rungis and Tours – whose City of Gastronomy projects have been selected by the French Mission for Heritage and Food Cultures (MFPCA) to embody the “Gastronomic meal of the French”, registered in the intangible cultural heritage of Unesco since 2010.
On its website, the MFPCA recalls that the four cities making up this network aimed at “highlighting French food culture” are each subject to a specific program and implementation. Thus, while Dijon stands out for the “valorization and promotion of the culture of the vine and wine” – the city is also listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the Climats of the Burgundy vineyards – Tours relies on its “University of Food Sciences and Cultures”. The Lyon metropolitan area, for its part, focuses its project on the triptych “food, health, nutrition”. However, these attractive projects have yet to prove their economic viability.
An economic fiasco in Lyon
To date, only the International City of Gastronomy in Lyon, whose size and ambition were much more modest than that of Dijon, has officially seen the light of day. Only, the project, inaugurated in October 2019, very quickly turned into a fiasco before being definitively completed by the health crisis, in July 2020. The Lyon metropolis invokes several reasons: on the one hand, the choice of the very “forced to fit” – the renovated former Hôtel-Dieu – but also the “political pressure” the moment that led to opening as soon as possible or the choice to have delegated the management of the museum to a private service provider, the Spanish MagmaCultura.
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“Like all museums in France, without public money, you cannot function unless you provide entertainment, but in our case the scenography was not at all interactive, we explain on the side of the metropolis. There was a big disappointment from the opening, and MagmaCultura did not have the financial capacity to recover. »
The Dijon project then appears as a response to this resounding failure. “There was a double pitfall that we wanted to avoid. The first was to turn it into a museum, as Lyon tried, without success. The second was to make it a shopping center since it already exists, explains François Rebsamen. So we made a place to live, to enjoy, which is constantly frequented and accessible to all.. »
In concrete terms, the Cité dijonnaise is like a large open space where various paying activities rub shoulders: an exhibition center managed by the town hall, a 5,000 m² shopping mall, an innovation center bringing together around fifteen start-ups but also a hotel, cinemas or a space dedicated to culinary training and oenological initiation. It is even possible to live year-round within the gastronomic city, in an eco-district of 600 housing units.
In Tours and Paris, two projects on hold
In Lyon, the new term of office is working on the revival of its local gastronomic city. “The old project focused on international attractiveness and grand tourism. On the contrary, we are going to target the new one to the inhabitants of the metropolis, particularly targeting a young audience. For now, and until 2023, we are in a phase of experimenting with the formats that work best,” details Jéremy Camus, vice-president of the metropolis.
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As for the Tours and Paris-Rungis projects, they are not yet sufficiently advanced for us to be able to see clearly their economic model. Concerning the Ile-de-France city, the driving towns have launched a call for projects and are currently working on the selection of the private service provider who will win. The winner is to be revealed in November 2022.
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The “gastronomic meal” of the French
According to Unesco, “it is a festive meal where the guests practice, for this occasion, the art of “eating well” and “drinking well”. The gastronomic meal emphasizes the fact of being well together, the pleasure of taste, the harmony between the human being and the productions of nature. Among its important components are: the careful choice of dishes from a body of recipes that continues to grow; the purchase of good products, preferably local, whose flavors go well together; the pairing of food and wine; the decoration of the table; and a specific gesture during the tasting (smell and taste what is served at the table). The gastronomic meal must follow a well-defined pattern: it begins with an aperitif and ends with a digestive, with between the two at least four courses, namely a starter, fish and/or meat with vegetables, cheese and a dessert.