Europan Germany

E15: Topic

Productive Cities 2 - Productive Cities 2

Ecological Resources - New Mobility - Fairness

After Europan 14, Europan 15 is once again concerned with the "Productive City" and expands the topic by three important components on the basis of the serious changes in European cities.

The upcoming Europan procedure is to further develop the idea of a "Productive City of the Future", as already presented in the drafts for Europan 14, with special consideration of the ecological dimension.

An ecologically conceived, productive transformation relies on synergies rather than opposites. Taking such synergies between ecosystems, people, and the built environment seriously also implies new, non-sectoral, collaborative approaches to solutions. Such an approach requires both participating architects and planners, as well as decision-makers, to commit to taking and advancing the responsibility entrusted to them for the urban environment.

Europan 15 therefore proposes to focus on three topics in particular in the sense of such non-sectoral, collaborative approaches to solutions for a productive city:Resources - Mobility - Fairness.

 

Resources

How can the consumption of and pollution from resources be minimized (water, air, soil, energy, etc.)? How can resources be better shared? What ideas of social, technical, architectural and urban planning innovations are to be developed in this context?

 

Mobility

How can new forms of mobility and, in general, accessibility to and within productive neighborhoods that is as threshold-free and open as possible be implemented?

 

Fairness

What can the idea of spatial equity contribute to social justice? How can spatial and social conditions be better linked? How to create a good balance between different neighborhoods with their different forms of productivity, how to balance the differences and conflicts between urban and rural, between rich and poor in an urban context?

 

Three different scales

The three thematic areas - resources, mobility and equity - can be addressed at three different scales depending on the location: large territorial scale, medium neighborhood scale, micro level of individual buildings.

The large territorial scale - the XL level - encompasses a view of the network of all ecologies that shape the city, and thus can extend beyond the city itself. It refers, for example, to the relationship between city and countryside and examines the changes in a wide variety of uses and material cycles and their relationships to one another. With this scale extension, the Europan competition aims to provide cities with an instrument for spatial developments in a regional context by means of strategic studies.

The middle level - L - refers to the urban neighborhood, or to certain parts of the city selected for strategic reasons for processing in the Europan competition. This L-level should make it possible to develop new ideas and concepts, especially for urban, projects at this scale.

The micro level includes the scale of individual projects and their architecture. It examines what repercussions these can have on the whole in the sense of a "productive city". It is also the scale level of the rapid realization of smaller and larger interventions - possibly using only temporary measures.

In this respect, the challenge for the Europan 15 competition is also to find a variety of different sites where productive uses play a role in terms of new synergies between the architecture, the neighborhood and the city as a whole. These reciprocal relationships are to be worked on at the three levels of scale addressed.