EUROPAN 5

The new habitat landscapes displacement and proximity

EUROPAN has chosen as its field of research the abandoned urban spaces in European cities that are located at the intersection of travel networks. Over the last 50 years, the growth of European cities has meant a huge consumption of vast peripheral territories in order to establish the new areas and their infrastructures. The peripheries have been formed along the lines determined by displacement and built-up fragments. In between, there have been spaces little or not at all affected by this situation. At the same time, cities have left fallow areas of territory whose functions had become obsolete. All these reasons were enough to encourage the emergence of a boxed-in city, made up of spaces left on account of a process of extensive urbanisation.

While unifying visions of the city are in crisis, the question is how to reclaim these interstitial spaces and turn them into habitable places. How to create new forms of urban landscape? And if the overall form of the city is no longer to be controlled, how can all these residual and disparate contemporary sites be transformed into valuable land? How to create residential, landscape and architectural entities as new parts inserted in the puzzle of the existing city, in the torn and discontinuous tapestry of the modern metropolis?

EUROPAN 5 proposes several themes to young architects around this challenge, formulated as questions addressed to both architectural design and urban planning policies. These themes can intersect, inducing responses in the form of draft ideas. Based on concrete situations selected in several European cities, these projects will have to be set in the context of very different urban cultures, but affected by the same questions.

 

Nature and habitat

Nature and buildings are mixed together in no apparent order and housing plots proliferate. Is this process irreversible? How to avoid the phenomenon of tentacular periphery? Can urban densification, collective spaces and nature be reconciled with the inhabitants' desire for highly individualised housing?

 

Commuting and residential accessibility

In the city of fragmented functions and multiple commuting, the issue of accessibility to residential areas is of paramount importance. On the basis of what criteria and with what spatial treatment can these networks favour urban connections, avoiding becoming factors of spatial rupture?

 

An induced urbanism

How to relate the abstract space of mobility to the more physical and sensitive space of residential neighbourhoods? How then to induce new formalisations of the city? New ways of life How can the space of proximity, of neighbourhoods and encounters, typical of residential areas, be designed? What does it mean to live in the city today? Is it perhaps owning a single-family house on a suburban plot? More individual living space? Living in collective buildings close to urban service areas? Living in contact with nature? Or to be able to find inhabited public spaces within walking distance of housing?

 

Intensification of uses

What types of programmes are capable of generating, either in themselves or in their surroundings, residential neighbourhoods with urban life? Should a network of functional clusters be created, should a variety of pluralistic programmes be proposed, or should contextual opportunities be exploited in their socio-economic diversity?

 

Managing complexity

To test the project's capacity to integrate the different parameters of urban complexity and its management: multiplicity of intervening parties, mix of public and private interlocutors, programmatic instability, change of uses that affect the urban and architectural space that must be designed as a non-static process, with continuous comings and goings between the global idea, the multiple formalisations and the staggered implementation over time. How to create a project strong enough to be developed over time, integrating the permanent negotiation between urban form, programming and architectural definition?

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+info:

EUROPAN / Spain
CALLS: Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda (MITMA)
IN COLLABORATION WITH: Ministry of Public Works Higher Council of the Spanish Architects' Associations (CSCAE) ASEMAS State Company for Land Development and Equipment

RESULTS

By categories

Jury

Elías Torres TurLuis Martínez Santa-MaríaGerardo Mingo PinachoRicardo Sánchez LampreaveCarlos Sambricio Presidente del jurado : Carlos Ferrán Alfaro

  • EUROPAN 5. Awarded. Location Almere
    EUROPAN 5. Awarded. Location Almere

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