PRO DU CTIVE CITIES Preface Anna Catasta President of Europan
Europan’s 14th session confirms the vitality of the competitions organised by Europan, which stands out as one of the most significant contributors to the process of city regeneration
in Europe. Here – and everywhere in the world – cities have increasingly become places of contradictions, open to criticism, but also territories with great potential for innovation and development.
Cities in 13 European countries proposed 44 sites for Europan 14, sites with challenges of transformation based on an ecological approach and innovative contributions to urban programmes, and in this session with the additional requirement to incorporate production. For the 1350 teams registered – made up of urban design and architecture professionals
under the age of 40 – the objective therefore was to find in each specific context what type(s) of production were compatible with the revitalisation of urban life.
Overall, the theme struck a chord with European urban leaders who are looking to move away from a century of functionalism founded in urban sprawl, the separation of functions
and a city fabric fragmented by car-based mobility. Though all the strategies on the sites
propose a new functional mix that includes the productive dimension, they take different
forms depending on the context. Some sites are former industrial zones that require profound regeneration, with a new approach to production linked with the creation of the future city. Others, by contrast, are sites with still partially dynamic productive activity, which
need to be enhanced and reconnected. In a third category, the issue is infrastructures and how to measure the impact of multi-mobility and inter-mobility on the active revitalisation
of urban fabrics to make way for the productive city. A final category of sites consists of
existing urban fabrics in which the role of production – largely excluded in the past – needs to be rethought.
13 national juries, some of them combined, undertook the analysis and assessment of the 1003 projects submitted. Meeting twice in the second half of 2017, they first shortlisted
approximately 25% of projects that they saw as containing promising ideas. Then, after a
European Forum held in October 2017 in Helsinki (FI), which brought together the juries and the site representatives around debates that covered more than purely local issues, the juries overall selected 41 winning teams, 47 runners-up, and 48 for special mention.
This catalogue is the European tool that provides access to the multiplicity of these proposals, classified according to the four families of sites. These projects offer a long-term vision of the metamorphosis of the sites, but many of them are also project-processes that propose methods of development over time. Indeed, building the productive city requires the involvement of all the actors around the ideas proposed and unified action that goes
beyond sectoral priorities and is as much political as spatial, as much public as private, as much local as global.
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EUROPAN 14 Articles by experts analyse groups of projects from a thematic perspective and elucidate
the content of this session. They contribute – from the European scale and the contextual scale – to the understanding of this diversity of ideas.
RESULTS