The Europan theme acts to stimulate ideas to mobilise multiple competences (architecture, town planning, landscape, sociology, environment) of the young architecture and urban design professionals, and also as a vector line to help cities and developers involved inarchitectural and urban innovation, to propose sites for the session.
It involves collaboration with the towns and urban developers in the organising countries because the ultimate aim of the European vision of the city is “to make society”, in other words to bring together people of all conditions and origins. However, the dominant trend towards individualisation cannot be ignored. This is precisely the contradiction that Europan addresses: on the one hand wanting the city - i.e animation, communal life, people - and on the other side wanting intimacy, privacy, home and the immediate circle. Urbanity can be defined as a shared way of experiencing the city and its functions but also as a way of envisaging city space on an urban and architectural scale to create the conditions for people to come together in communal places: public space.Urbanity is a political, social and cultural theme which encourages thinking about the forms of public space by re-placing them in their local and environmental context.
PUBLIC SPACE: MEANINGS, CHALLENGES AND LIMIT
Before formulating the common criteria of the Europan sites around the theme, it is important to try to define what makes urbanity, i.e. a certain way of envisaging public space. In urban societies, public space represents all the through-spaces appropriable by all and by everyone directly accessible, without restrictions if are respected the rules of use, established by the public authority. It forms the spatial structure that links together private plots, that facilitates or codifies the relations between them, commerce, the expression of community life and of certain forms of freedom and conflict. As a structure, it determines the development of the city and adapts to the site with the streets and infrastructures network. Urban public space is also a locus of public power: general organisation of the city, urban infrastructures and symbolic or monumental operations. Sometimes or necessarily opposed to power, it is also a locus of freedoms, of expression, of appropriation, of identification…
Urban public space is strongly imprinted with local lifestyles and activities. This imprint takes many forms: the atmosphere, colour and decorations of the street, markets, communal activities (terraces, stalls, games, etc.) largely protect the social status and anonymity of everyone, with a wide variety of possibilities in cities. The explicit use of the concept of public space is relatively recent and its modern meaning - as a particular space - dates back to the second half of the 20th century. These days, we tend to think of it as a type of space that has a certain number of specific features: an empty space in tension between elements of urban fabric; space of mediation, vehicle of social life. Dynamic space containing the values, symbols and signs of urban life, it is a space to welcome the possible ones and plural practices. A place of alliance and peace but also of conflict and insecurity, public space is governed by a certain rationality, organisation, but can also awaken the imagination, facilitate daydreaming. So public space is at the same time that of the everyday, the festive or the playful.
The questions raised by this attempt are:
- Can neighbourhood and local spaces be seen as part of the public domain when their use is restricted to a specific community of users?
- Can we use the term public space for the new communal spaces - such as shopping malls, cultural and leisure centres, stations and airports - which have become important elements of the urban project, but where commercial space takes precedence over public space?
- What status can public space have in the space of the “diffuse” city - a “networked” city - at a time when the issues of the sustainable city oblige to reformulate the question of urban public space in terms of stratification - main characteristic of the European cities? Does European public space.- caught as it is between these two aspect of the city, still generate urban identity?
These are the questions around which the 9th session of Europan wishes to create a dialogue between the urban needs of towns and cities and the vision of young architecture and urban design professionals.
Standortbefund europäischer Kommunen Für EUROPAN 9 und auch die künftigen Wettbewerbsrunden wird das bisherige Wettbewerbsthema ersetzt EUROPAN wird zum "Labor" europäischer Standortentwicklungen. Nach einer minimierten Vorgabe von Standortkriterien schlagen Kommunen, Grundstücksbesitzer oder Bauträger Wettbewerbsgebiete vor, die aufgrund ihrer Problematik oder ihres Potenzials eine strategische Rolle in der Stadtentwicklung einnehmen. Der Querschnitt aller europäischen Gebiete bildet folglich einen Befund jener Problemstellungen, mit denen sich die europäischen Städte heute konfrontiert sehen.
Wie können sich Begegnungen unterschiedlicher Interessen heute ereignen? Welche Strukturen bzw. Infrastrukturen erzeugen Situationen der "gemeinsamen Teilnahme" und damit eine öffentliche Wirksamkeit bzw. Bedeutung für ein Gebiet? Schließlich: wie ist das Verhältnis zwischen Intimität und Öffentlichkeit zu bewerkstelligen - "technisch" wie auch ökonomisch?
Die Rolle des öffentlichen Raums im Verhältnis zu den bestehenden Möglichkeiten zu aktualisieren, ist entscheidend für die Profilierung der "europäischen urbanität". Als "Akteure" gleichermaßen angesprochen sind die "europäische Gesellschaft" in ihrem zeitgenössischen Lebensstil, die Behörden in ihrer Stadtplanungspolitik, die Wirtschaft in ihrer Produktionsfähigkeit, sowie die jungen Planer in ihrer Praxis.
Konkrete Lösungsansätze für unterschiedliche Standortsituationen in Europa erkunden das Phänomen der "europäischen urbanität" über die Praxis des Architekturentwurfs. Das für die künftigen Wettbewerbsrunden gewählte, permanente Thema "europäische urbanität" leitet eine neue Phase EUROPANS ein: der Wettbewerb agiert als Indikator für Entwicklungen, mit denen sich unsere Kommunen konfrontiert sehen. Die demografischen, ökonomischen und ökologischen Auswirkungen auf unsere Städte sind heute mehr denn je geprägt von der Verflechtung lokaler, regionaler und überregionaler Bedingungen. Die Zukunftsfähigkeit jeder einzelnen Kommune hängt maßgeblich davon ab, wie sie die unterschiedlichen Dimensionen dieser Bedingungen zu koordinieren vermag.