Visitors to the apartment are immediately greeted by the chirps of dozens of crickets, sitting on egg boxes in vivariums. The eye is then drawn to the vegetation of every kind of herb overflowing from wooden worktops. The apartment, bathed in light and enveloped in the sandy tones of cotton canvas stretched across the walls and seagrass matting on the floor, exudes a feeling of serenity. One could almost forget that it's located in the heart of Boulogne-Bilancourt, an ultra-urbanized western Parisian suburb. Corentin de Chatelperron, 41, and Caroline Pultz, 31, chose to live here to develop an "apartment of the future," which enables near-autonomous living with 100% low-technologies that are "useful, accessible and sustainable."

Spending four months isolated in the Mexican desert in 2023 was a radical change of scenery for the couple. A nomad at heart, de Chatelperron is an engineer and the co-founder of the Low-tech Lab and has lived self-sufficiently in a jute sailboat in the Bay of Bengal and on a floating raft off the Thailand coast. "But today, more than one human in two lives in a city and by 2050, city dwellers will represent 70% of the world's population," said Pultz the designer. From July to the end of November, the two environmental adventurers have set themselves the task of envisioning what sustainable urban life might look like in 2040.

"We want to create a new and desirable archetypal world, which is not a high-tech future around the metaverse, or a retrogressive backward step. We're suggesting another way of living healthily within the planet's limits," said de Chatelperron, whose Urban Biosphere experiment is being financed by the Boulogne-Billancourt town council, the National Center of Spatial Studies and Arte, a Franco-German public service channel. The commune has lent the couple a 26m2 studio, which used to be a daycare, in which to experiment with some 20 low-tech inventions – technological adaptations that de Chatelperron thought up on his travels around the world between 2016 and 2022.

The toilets are not dry but "living": Feces are broken down into compost by black soldier fly larvae. In the shower, a mister has replaced the shower head, which also sprays oyster mushrooms that provide a kilo of mushrooms a week. The same water is filtered and recycled through a closed-loop system to feed the dozens of bioponic (no soil) plants grown in the main room. The sprouts, along with the mushrooms and crickets – which although a departure from their vegetarian diet, are a source of vitamin B12 – make up only part of the couple's dietary needs. As their goal is not complete autonomy, they get fruit and vegetables in exchange for half a day's work at the Ferme de Boulogne butcher's shop and also buy local produce from organic grocery stores.

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