Europan Notebooks #1

Countries

Competition

INTER-SESSION FORUM E17/E18

At ETSAM MADRID

Europan is organizing the Inter-session Forum in Madrid on October 18 and 19, 2024. The Forum aims to celebrate the 101 winning teams in the Europan 17 competition and to bring together and discuss the cities of the new Europan 18 sites, with representatives of sites from previous sessions, around the presentation of their achievements. The Forum is reserved for the winners of E17 and the cities of E18 and the national organizers. Europan Notebooks #2 will report on these European meetings.

RE-SOURCING

A new theme for Europan 18

The fragility of the Earth's ecosystem and social crises lead to the imagination of alternative practices to harmful extraction of resources, overconsumption and pollution of living milieus. Regenerating projects embracing nature and culture are to be though and implemented. It is about weaving synergies between biogeophysical data with socio-spatial justice and health ones. Three main directions for designing forms of resilience and resourcing of inhabited milieus make possible to reactivate other forms of dynamics and narratives around the ecologies of living and caring.

1 - Re-sourcing through natural elements / risks

The natural and vital elements of water, air, earth and fire are today linked to risks and disasters which affect places, and the entire ecosystem of milieus from the moment that are triggered cataclysms, resulting from deleterious developments. In order to enable a new alliance with inhabited milieus, it is time to rethink these vital elements, by finding logics of adaptation with the built environment, and by combining them together in projects.

2 - Re-sourcing through ways of life and of inclusivity

The reconsideration of living conditions also requires sustained attention to changes in lifestyles in a hyper-connected digital world. Arrangements capable of simultaneously preserving intimacy, commonality and solidarity are at stake, correlated with bioclimatic and permacultural strategies in which humans and non-humans can cooperate.

3 - Re-sourcing through materiality

The already built now constituting a phenomenal source of materials, it is important to design devices for transforming existing buildings driven by the strategy of the 3 R’s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle): Reduce new construction. Reuse in the sense of reusing already constructed spaces and materials. Recycle by using bio-geo sourced materials (earth, stone, fiber), anticipating deconstruction and becoming local again (mobilizing know-how and materials present on the sites).
This is to promote the
preservation of natural resources.

Each site will be presented at two scales:
- The territorial scale of the “reflection site” (red limit) which will reveal the geographical and ecological elements (topography, geology, natural elements, etc.), the logic of mobility and large-scale lifestyles - using maximum mapping - and which impact the project site today and, potentially, in the future.
- The proximity scale, that of the “project site”, where the existing situation (physical space, nature, lifestyles) and the city’s intentions for its development in the future will be presented in a clear and precise manner.
Projet image - Makarska (HR) - Runner-up - Re-sourcing through ways of life and inclusivity Projet image - Makarska (HR) - Runner-up - Re-sourcing through ways of life and inclusivity

Questions to the competitors

The challenge for competitors, in their project- processes, will be to converge the three types of resources because it is their intersection which will generate a promising spectrum of resilient projects in the face of the scarcity of resources and the vulnerability of sites.

The questions asked are:

What are the new ways of designing to adapt to climate change: rising water levels, air pollution, drought, etc.?

How to introduce into projects the regeneration and remediation of soils making them more porous and alive, increasing the biodiversity in the built spaces, in order to make them more livable?

How can we imagine new dynamic and productive use scenarios to revitalize communities of humans and other than humans?

How can we invent a new materiality of the spaces that can result from the use of bio- materials originating mainly from local resources and falling within the logic of a circular economy?

How can we hybridize inside the teams the different skills necessary for these projects which combine the consideration of natural elements, new lifestyles and the use of bio- materials?

Which scales should be mixed to make the proposed answers relevant? Can a project on a proximity site be combined with reflection on the larger scale of the territory? Should an urban project also be available on a proximity scale to illustrate its impact?

Click here to read the booklet on the E18 theme

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*Europan is an European network of architectural, urban planning and landscape ideas competitions for young designers who take care of inhabited milieus, and followed by implementation processes