Press release

THE EUROPAN 16 JURIES HAVE MADE THEIR CHOICES

Among 677 PROJECTS submitted by 2148 participants

on 40 SITES in 9 different European COUNTRIES:

Austria (3 sites), Belgium (3 sites), France (11 sites), Germany (5 sites), Italy (2 sites), Norway (4 sites), Spain (7 sites), Sweden (3 sites) and Switzerland (2 sites);

9 national juries have named:

40 WINNERS, 41 RUNNERS-UP and 46 SPECIAL MENTIONS on the theme

Living cities
Metabolic vitalities – Inclusive vitalities

The winning teams were officially announced on December 13nd, 2021, and the list of winning teams is available online on www.europan-europe.eu

The EUROPAN 16 competition, a European competition of urban and architectural projects leading to implementation, was organised as a joint initiative by 9 European structures. This session theme was: Living cities, combining metabolic and inclusive vitalities.

The juries named 127 rewarded teams – among which 40 winners, 41 runners-up plus 46 special mentions. The winning teams are based in 17 different countries – 55% (70 teams) won in their residence country; 45% (57 teams) hence won abroad. The teams that were most motivated to compete abroad are located in Spain (15 teams out of the 36 winning teams based in Spain won a prize on a foreign site), in Italy (6 teams out of 8) and Germany (5 teams out of 12).

The 127 teams, the members of which are all younger than 40, are composed of 436 people: 376 associates considered as authors of the projects assisted by 60. Among these associates, 63% are architects, 19% are urban planners and 9% are landscape architects. The Master students allowed to participate in the competition with, at least, 1 professional are 6% of the associates and are spread among 14 awarded teams. The average age of an associate member is 31 years. 44% of these young European teams have formed a multidisciplinary team, while 33% of teams are multinational.

In the first stage, on the basis of pre-analyses by expert committees, the 9 national juries have pre-selected 201 proposals - 30% of the projects submitted - between September and October 2021.

This pre-selection was then subject to a comparative analysis of the pre-selected ideas and a Europe-wide debate between representatives of the sites and national juries during the Forum of Cities and Juries held from 4 to 6 November 2021 in San Sebastián, Spain.

The final selection of the winning projects by the national juries took place between November and early December.

The winning and runner-up teams respectively receive a prize of 12,000€ and 6,000€, so overall 726 000€ are distributed.

The winning projects show the interest of young teams in creating synergies between the environmental, biological, social, economic, cultural and political dimensions of our cities. These projects address contemporary issues:

• How does taking climate change into account force us to think of a new ecosystem between nature and culture?
• How can we think of the city in terms of metabolic dynamics in relation to cyclical processes that spare the environment and move from a linear economy to a circular economy?
• How can nature invest urban territories?
• How to take care of living environments and transform segregated spaces by linking the social with the ecological?
• How to overcome the city-nature opposition by minimizing the environmental footprint and the consumption of non-renewable energy?
• How can the project put resources, common goods, recycling, hybridization, sharing and temporalities into space, while preserving them?

It is around these main questions raised by the sites that the winning projects have designed innovative answers and a narrative of the future that stages a production of the project.

Beyond the competition phase in which several innovative and contextualised ideas are selected, and after a communication intermediary phase around the awarded projects and teams (exhibitions, catalogues, debates, workshops), the cities and their partners who have proposed a site are committed to implementing a number of these projects in the form of urban studies, strategic projects and concrete achievements.

During 2022, the winning teams’ portraits will be published on europan-europe.eu. An exhibition of all the winning projects will be set up during the Inter-Sessions Forum in Fall 2022, to which the winning teams will be invited.

The European Results Catalogue will present the winning projects (winners, runners-up, special mentions) with the winning teams’ and juries’ points of view. In articles, experts will analyse the results from the angle of the innovating proposals on the session theme. The catalogue will be available for sale (on the European website and in bookshops) and for free online consultation (low definition) next spring.

 

In Austria 46 projects were submitted for the 3 sites, in Belgium 43 projects for 3 sites, in France 185 projects for 11 sites, in Germany 83 projects for 5 sites, in Italy 24 projects for 2 sites, in Norway 100 projects for 4 sites, in Spain 125 projects for 7 sites, in Sweden 45 projects for 3 sites and in Switzerland 26 projects for 2 sites.

Discover here the portraits of the winners, runnners-up and special mentions.