Survey - How do cities consider Europan?

What interests does Europan hold for the municipalities and site representatives

By Didier Rebois, architect, teacher, Secretary General of Europan

The Forum of Sites directly addresses the sites representatives for the new Europan 12 session. Its aim is to be as interactive as possible and not to include long lectures, long speeches, but to involve as much dialogue as possible, to generate dynamic discussions at European level. Two debates will show the links between Europan and the municipalities in this 12th session, the theme of which is The adaptable city, Inserting Urban Rhythms. 

The first debate will explore the Europan themes to assess whether they are useful to you, can they change and do they address the problems that you encounter in your urban developments, in your city, in particular around the theme of this session: the ability of urban planning and architecture to adapt to changes in ways of life, in urban processes, in ecology? The subject of this first debate will therefore be the content of Europan in relation to the urban policies of the participating municipalities.

The second debate will explore the questions of processes, since Europan is a competition to select interesting and innovative projects, and to put young teams on the map, but it also aim, as far as possible and whenever possible, at leading into urban processes. These urban processes encompass a whole series of different phases, which may be anything from urban studies to actual construction… In the second debate, we will tackle the question of the processes of transition from the competition ideas to reality and the way in which, relative to the way the municipalities work on urban projects, the winning projects can be implemented and innovations developed (whether to do with relations between the stakeholders, urban approaches, time factors in urban processes, etc.)

To introduce these two debates, I would like quickly to present the results of a survey we conducted with the site representatives from previous sessions. We had already carried out a survey with young professionals who have taken part in the competition to obtain feedback on their vision of Europan; and we conducted a second survey, before this forum, with the representatives of sites that had already participated in Europan. The results are fairly positive in terms of the views of Europan amongst the municipalities and site representatives, who come from almost every country in Europe.

Does the competition produce quality?

The first, somewhat direct question, was on the competition’s value for money, the balance between the quality of the results obtained by the municipalities and the investment they put in, not only in financial terms, but also in terms of time and energy. In 90% of the answers, the respondents said that they had not wasted time or money in participating in Europan. Overall, the view is that this competition is not in itself too expensive, even though it demands heavy investment in the post-competition phase to initiate and develop implementation processes that culminate in a completed project.

And 98% of the respondents answered that they were satisfied with the quality of the projects submitted on their sites. It should be remembered that Europan is not just one project per site, that the juries can choose several projects representing alternative ideas and visions on a given site. And it is an advantage to municipalities to have this diversity of options for subsequent management, through intermediate processes (which may be workshops or meetings) to help understand these ideas and choose the ones that may go forward and contribute to an urban strategy of spatial transformation.

Does taking part in Europan enhance the image of municipalities?

The next question was whether the Europan competition has a positive impact on image. Communication about the results of a session undoubtedly needs to be improved at European and national scale, but also at local scale in the different towns and cities where there are touring exhibitions to tell the local population about the projects. The site representatives who responded were satisfied with this possibility to communicate on the future vision for their areas, and to stimulate debate or discussion around changes to the site with local stakeholders, including of course users, local people and residents.

What types of implementation processes emerge after the

competition?

Three quarters of the respondents have continued to work with the winning teams after the competition. It is an objective for us that as many winning teams as possible should subsequently be involved in operational processes. However, the survey gives us a picture of what types of operational phase are developed: 31% replied that they had set up local workshops where the teams could develop their ideas. Almost half had involved the winning team in an urban project. When it comes to the actual implementation stage, we can say that 25% of the winning teams get to the construction phase of a project. These responses on implementation provide some indicators that will be useful in the second debate: how to continue after the competition, how to involve teams in implementation processes and we can see that this takes different forms. We know that at the competition stage, what we have are ideas and proposals for strategies and ways of developing the site, not finished projects. Moreover, the teams may come from another country. There is therefore much to be done to achieve a transition to operational processes, and the responses show that there are a fairly large number of projects which not only evolve, of course, around the winning ideas, but that the projects themselves change. These projects are not finished objects, but material for negotiation, for a debate with all the stakeholders, who may be many and not always in agreement when it comes to urban issues. This idea of the negotiated project and a negotiation between stakeholders around a winning project is therefore of great interest to us. We find that two thirds of the site representatives who responded had had a negotiated project, which means that they had held discussions with multiple parties, including the winning teams, on how to develop the winning ideas. 86% find that they establish innovative processes. These responses are also very interesting and will be the subject of the second debate, i.e. how the processes that follow the Europan competition can in themselves constitute an innovation. 

However, do these young winning teams have the capacity to perform the role expected of them in complex urban processes? The satisfaction rate is high, since 83% of clients say that the team was able to contribute coherently to the process.