ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition Winners Announced

ResilientCity.org just announced the winners of their design ideas competition that hopes to stimulate new ideas about the way we plan cities and design buildings.

The competition resulted in more than 50 inquiries and 22 formal entries received from around the globe, including proposals centered on cities in India, Mexico, Israel, Tibet, Germany, as well as the USA and Canada. “Many of the entries presented very credible and implementable solutions that could be utilized today to move our cities towards greater resiliency,” said Craig Applegath, founding member and moderator of ResilientCity.

The grand prize winner, “From the Ground Up”, by Michael Haggerty and Raj Kottamasu, of Brooklyn, NY, USA, examined how to create food self-sufficiency in the urban neighborhood of Westside in Newark, New Jersey. Their neighborhood plan looks at how to provide a hierarchy of food production and processing facilities through adaptation of various kinds of ground. These are connected by a new green corridor system that is a space of congregation, distribution, and exchange. The proposal emphasizes, in particular, the ‘Resilient City Design Principles’ of Systems diversity, Systems redundancy, Local self-sufficiency, and Waste = Food. According to the jury, “The winner did a thorough job of understanding and interpreting all the principles of resiliency, and presented them in a highly legible fashion. The solutions used cultural, social and economic elements to effectively integrate a new food supply source into an economically viable model.” Craig Applegath said, “Indeed, this was a very bottom-up, grassroots approach, very do-able in a neighborhood context.”

The winner of the Urban Design Category was “Food=Utility”, by Robert Shepherd at Grey Studio, in San Francisco, CA. This entry presented a very inspired proposal to reclassify food and access to food, now considered as a commercial venture, turning it into a public utility. This concept would allow available public land to become arable, private land to be capitalized, and just-in-time processing methods that promote local and regional food access. With such a proposal, the rezoning of land becomes a key tool to changing the way food is produced and distributed. As the author states: “The project Food=Utility is a speculative proposal for reclassifying food and access to food; from a commercial prospect to a public utility. This proposal came in part, from an interest in using zoning models to produce planning strategies, which are generative rather than static, and from the recognition that zoning models based on commercial development models are insufficient for dealing with the problems associated with food and food access.” This concept was considered the most innovative one, and well thought out, but the jury felt that it might have pushed the exploration of its concepts a bit further.

In architectural category of submissions, the jury awarded two honorable mentions. The first was the “Hydronic Deformation” proposal by L. Garofalo and A. Adderley, a project that explored how an existing curtain-wall clad high-rise building might be re-clad with a network of metal tubing that would circulate warm water to precondition air around the building, as well as to serve as a scaffolding for growing hanging vines for shading the window surfaces in summer months. The second was the “Urban Villas” project by Alexander Eisenschmidt of Chicago, Illinois, that explored the opportunity to create a low-rise mixed use urban block in the town of Quedlinburg, Germany.

“The purpose of this competition was to stimulate dialogue, to get people thinking and talking about ways to meet the challenges of designing cities for a future faced with large population growth, significant climatic changes and more self-sufficient energy sources,” said Applegath. “To get people asking: How will our cities have to change to survive and thrive in this new environment? What responsibilities do urban designers, city planners and architects have to make the necessary changes? By this measure I think the competition was a great success!”