On September 28 and 29 the nine international jury members, the representatives of the city and the project leaders of the different Europan locations came together for the first round of judging. Sabine Labesque and Eric van der Kooij from the city of Amsterdam gave an informative presentation of the development and the planning context of Amsterdam in general. Future planning challenges the city has to cope with were addressed as well as the ambitions to steer more on densification, mixed uses development and spatial quality. For each location they and the project leaders gave insights in the site specific situation, addressing cultural values, social structures and economic activities followed by a selection of different approaches for the locations where the project leaders could react to.
The jury and the city representatives were delighted with the amount of interessting proposals. Also the way the participants dealt with the complex assignments representing a bundle of inspirations how to spatially approach the theme for the different sites was enthusiastically received. The range of possible outcomes differ from urban design guidelines, development strategies to small scale interventions in architecture or public space. The Europan submissions show a lot of valuable and interesting research of the locations as well as very different spatial qualities that were achieved in the proposals, presented in impressive drawings and diagrams. The entries varied on the range from mega structures, grids and superblocks to subtle infill’s of the urban tissue and strategies with a lot of freedom in development, acupuncture approaches and ‘soft’ programming. In most of the entries the link between big and small scale is the main focus in their approach and some of them even were integrating landscape and the bigger urban scale in the design schemes.
After the presentation the jury started discussing all entries of the different locations and continued doing that the following day. As result of this intensive session the jury selected 5 to 6 entries per location out of all 113 entries which are going to be presented on the Europan 14 ‘Forum of cities and juries’ in Helsinki end of October by representatives of the jury, the city and europan NL. The goal of that presentation is to discuss the different entries to create a shared culture on the results and to promote the meetings between the representatives of sites and experts at European scale. The findings of this meeting will be brought to the second jury round which will take place at 3rd of November. Then the international jury comes together again and will present the final winners and runner up’s for every location to the city representatives, explaining their conclusions and giving advise for possible implementation of the specific locations.
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