24
5 - Kaufbeuren (DE), special mention - Air sharing > see more P.247
scale bio-intensive market gardening. The aim is to employ limited financial and material resources and to plan annual rotations in order to keep the land productive and alive. The project also has a vision for local outlets and trans-local influence, based on new spatiotemporal and societal interactions, as explained: “We sought to understand to what extent the study of the big territorial structures at large scales and over long timeframes can help to establish the project’s fundamental principles at site scale. In this respect, we work with the concept of the ‘long-term’ fashioned by the historian Fernand Braudel, who defines three types of timeframe: the long-term of geographical structures, the medium-term of socio-economic conditions, and the short-term of political events. Applying this logic of different rhythms to urban planning means using territorial analysis to identify a structure (geographical, urban, landscape) and systems of organisation (of space, of people, of processes) sufficiently well rooted and shared to be adapted to the socio-economic and political circumstances of planning.” Similar relations between urban and agricultural are needed at Höganäs in Sweden (see p.236), a site characterised by the fertility of its land. Here,
7 - Bærum (NO), runner-up - Elasti-city > see more P.228
the winning project, Twinphenomena (fig.3), establishes a dialogue between urban and rural, careful to protect this precious resource, but with a project whose limits are nevertheless difficult to discern. Many of the projects are concerned with productive nature. For example the runner-up project, again at Höganäs (SE), Urbedible (fig.4), which explicitly situates itself in relation to the insertion of new urban rhythms correlated with food production; or the special mention project, Air sharing (fig.5), at Kaufbeuren in Germany, which combines agricultural production with energy generation. What seems to run through this family of projects, however, is the need, in responding to contemporary challenges, to tackle the adaptability of agricultural structures and to make productive nature and sustaining values a major architectural and political task.
Nature as structure The idea of nature as structure, which is another strong facet of the metamorphoses, entails approaching nature from another angle and
6 - Bærum (NO), winner - Social riverscape > see more P.226
emphasising its role as a medium of landscape, in other words to bring it into the foreground: topography with rivers, fields, forests having the potential to articulate different problematical and spatiotemporal scales, which correspond to the recreation of territorial forms based on overall coherences determined by the resistances and resources provided by the existing natural fabric. At Bærum in Norway (see p.224), the municipality wants to integrate the river more closely into the urban fabric, while protecting ecosystems. The winning project, Social riverscape (fig.6), opts for a sophisticated conceptual proposal with the capacity to introduce time and to envisage the harmonisation of successive layers of change, thereby combating the tendency to dissociation. It is another facet of nature as structure that is developed in the runner-up project, Elasti-city (fig.7), which devises a spinal column
8 - Paris Saclay (FR), winner - Negotiation lab > see more P.266
