Rimbo (SE)

Inhabited milieu's challenges

Rimbo is a commuter town located in the municipality of Norrtälje, north of Stockholm. The town has a strategic location about 55 km from Stockholm city, 50 km from Uppsala (Sweden’s fourth largest city) and a half-an-hour ride time to Arlanda, one of Sweden’s largest workplaces.
Around 5200 people are living in central Rimbo today and about 10 000 live in the Rimbo influence area. It is expected that central Rimbo’s population will double by 2050.
Rimbo grew as an important railway junction, and its centre was developed under the influence of the garden city principles during the early 20th century.
The project site includes Rimbo’s central areas and the entrance to the centre from the south.
The town centre is crossed by two national roads that are being converted into urban streets.The existing bus terminal is an oversized paved surface in the middle of the town, surrounded by surface parking lots.The city centre is dominated by hard surfaces and presents a lack of recreational spaces and greenery. Most of the commuting is nowadays by car due to the bad public transport connections but in some years the railway “Roslagsbanan”, which connects to Stockholm, might be extended to Rimbo. Galten, a historical industrial building placed in the centre of the site, is suggested to be used for the transportation hub facilities.The sou- thern part of the site is used by light industrial buildings without architectural value.This area will become a prolongation of the town centre, connecting to the main entrance to Rimbo from the south. But it has to solve the questions of how to fit the new railway while accommodating east-west connections over the future tracks to avoid the barrier effect as well as to integrate the green space southwest to the project site.
The challenge is to plan a sustainable development that finds a new identity for Rimbo’s centre as a place to live, work and visit while reflecting the town’s history as a rail hub.

Questions to the competitors

The competition proposal should give a solution to the entire site to develop a new lively town centre with a transportation hub for train and bus traffic. The transportation hub, suggested in Galten, can be treated as a landmark for the new town centre and should be possible to connect to the extension of the Roslagsbanan railway.
The development needs to embrace a holistic perspective to be able to create a visual and physical connection to areas both inside and outside the site, making it easier to understand the city structure, avoiding the barriers that the railway can create and connecting to the green structure and the surrounding agricultural landscape.
The new proposal must understand Rimbo’s proud history and identity and complement and complete it to shape what will be the future of Rimbo. It is recommended to present the proposal in different phases, so it can take into account the existing in the area and have a realistic plan for reusing or recycling what might need to be demolished.
Rimbo has to find its way both as an attractive town to live in, but also as a service hub for surrounding rural areas and for commuters.That includes creating a walkable lively town with green, inviting, and vibrant meeting places and a mix of uses including commerce, culture, sports, office, services, and industry with low environmental impact.
Besides having a high focus on sustainability, the new development must find solutions that are child-friendly and inclusive regardless of age, functional variations, or socioeconomic background.The proposal should present solutions for how day water and stormwater will be taken care of.The areas proposed for it should be multifunctional, visible and integrated into the urban design.