E17 Forum of Cities and Juries - Vienna 10-11/11

220 actors of the 17th session of Europan – met in Vienna Seestadt – to exchange, on a European scale, around the ideas and visions of the pre-selected projects, before the 11 juries make their choice and designate the winning teams.

Representatives of 51 sites in 12 European countries (elected officials and urban managers) were able to meet the members of the 11 juries (architects, landscapers, town planners, experts), and the organizers of the competition to, through exchange and debate, build a shared culture around the problem of the session: how to make inhabited environments more lively in European urban or suburban areas.
The 237 projects already preselected, out of the 816 projects submitted, had previously been analyzed by the Scientific Committee and the Europan Technical Commission - compounds of experts from different European countries - to serve as material for the debates which explored three main themes:

Let the birds sing! or how in already urbanized neighborhoods to increase space of biodiversity and thus fight against global warming?
From the small plot to the great wasteland, how to give the inhabitants natural breathing spaces in their built environment?

Imagine a second life! or how the reuse of the existing becomes an issue essential to insert construction into a circular economy and invent spaces regenerative from what is already there.
From a large hospital that has become obsolete to a small university which settles in a subdivision of houses, how to think about the changes of use and breathe new dynamics into these neglected spaces?

Think tabula non-rasa! or how to intelligently densify built extensions by being part of the built or natural traces of a site or territory, take advantage of this new to better reconnect with the environment, to regenerate the soil, to reclassify a degraded heritage, to bring back a river or a wood into a strategy urban that considers the evolution of an environment over time.

The young professionals of Europan 17 took all these issues head on when they left detailed analyzes of the potential of the sites, and by proposing project-processes capable of to repair, reactivate and enrich - over time - more or less mistreated environments, by adapting to climate change and new ways of thinking about habitability spaces through cohabitation between humans and non-humans.

Immersed thinking for 2 days in Vienna in the middle of these innovative projects exhibited and compared, the juries, in dialogue with the cities, prepared the choice of the winning teams who seem capable of taking care of and developing these contexts.
This was the challenge of the rich discussions in Vienna, through the comparison of the ideas proposed on a European scale from one site to another, from one design attitude to another, from one manufacturing process to another.
This enrichment of the evaluation work through exchanges between the participants of the session once again showed its effectiveness during this Forum of Cities and E17 Juries.

Thank you to all participants for being so strongly involved and with the desire to take into account take into account the views of others!

The results of the 11 competitions will be announced on the 4th December 2023, on the European Europan website: www.europan-europe.eu