Indeed, the ulti­mate aim of the Euro­pean vision of the city is to make soci­ety, in other words to bring together people of all con­di­tions and ori­gins. How­ever, the dom­i­nant trend towards indi­vid­u­al­i­sa­tion, the quest for auton­omy, cannot be ignored. This is pre­cisely the con­tra­dic­tion that Europan addresses: on the one hand want­ing the city – i.e ani­ma­tion, com­mu­nal life, people – and on the other side want­ing inti­macy, pri­vacy, home and the imme­di­ate circle.

Europan launched the tenth ses­sion of their young architects’ com­pe­ti­tion series yes­ter­day. This year’s topic is invent­ing urban­ity : regen­er­a­tion, revi­tal­iza­tion, colonization.

Whereas the subtopics make sense, the title appears to be far-​fetched. Do we need to ‘invent’ urban­ity? The prin­ci­ples of urban life are well under­stood since the first crit­i­cism of modern plan­ning had been advanced.

On the other hand I wel­come that the recent Europan ses­sions (‘European Urban­ity: Sus­tain­able City and New Public Space’) are much more con­cerned with den­sity and the urban con­di­tion than ear­lier issues (‘New Hous­ing Landscape’, ‘In-between Cities’). This year’s brief empha­sizes equally social and eco­log­i­cal issues.

Par­tic­i­pa­tion is lim­ited to the young (i. e. under 40) archi­tect who has 62 com­pe­ti­tion sites to choose from – 12.000€ for the winner, 6.000€ for the runner-​up. The sites are grouped into 3 subtopics –
those that must undergo a strong trans­for­ma­tion (regen­er­a­tion), those that must both keep their iden­tity and redy­namise their pro­gramme (revi­tal­iza­tion) and those that must undergo a devel­op­ment (colonization).

UPDATE: I have put together an overview table of all the com­pe­ti­tion sites for easy com­par­i­son (pdf):

UPDATE II: Check out the hard-to-find page with the reg­is­tra­tion sta­tis­tics. Typ­i­cal diploma projects come out on top, as of 8th of march 101 reg­is­tra­tions for Dunkerque, a har­bour pier transformation.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Europan Com­pe­ti­tion Starts Now’