Riverscaping Design Build Competition

The city of Hamburg, Germany was recently awarded the European Green Capital award. This award recognizes not only the city’s recent environmentally focused projects and solutions, but celebrates the city’s unique and compelling efforts toward addressing the many, complex issues that arise in bustling cities and their surrounding terrain. Simultaneously, the city is home to the Hamburg International Building Exhibition (IBA_HAMBURG), an ongoing project that brings artistic, experimental and environmentally concerned projects to realization within challenged communities. Influenced by citizens and community leaders, the IBA_HAMBURG functions for both the city and the citizens, embedded and connected. We have formed strong connections with citizens, professors and planners in the region, and have traveled to learn more about their progressive city. What we have learned has become the foundation for the competition, as we strive to use creative pla
 nning and small-scale installations to inspire change and progress in our region.

As the centerpiece of RIVERSCAPING, the design-build competition is designed to focus on two primary goals: to educate our communities about the challenges and successes of the EU, and Hamburg in particular; and use these as the foundation for lasting solutions for the Pioneer Valley region. While the city of Hamburg and its surrounding regions differ from the Pioneer Valley in several ways, our project set out to focus on what we share: the river. In many ways, the river defines both of our regions, acting as the impetus for their creation and important to the everyday life of the present-day cities. We share planning, policy and environmental issues that are common to post-industrial cities that affect everything from the economy to public health to architecture. At the same time, water presents both cities with endless possibilities for public engagement, technology, green conservation, renewable energy, community networking or transportation.

The objective of this competition is to uncover new public realm art, architectural and environmental approaches to riverscapes at two scales: regional and intimate. Each designer/artist/team will produce an overall strategy for connecting and relating the four defined sites (and those between) while paying attention to the unique and individual characteristics of each community through site specific work. At its core, the competition asks three main questions of its designers/artists/teams:

• What models from Hamburg could be applied to our region to assist us in envisioning inventive and progressive solutions to ongoing issues common to post-industrial cities?

• How can we utilize the river as the catalyst for awareness, change and growth within a region considering the following areas: economy, politics, environment, community, agriculture, transportation, public space, art, recreation, mapping, graphics?

• How can small-scale, local river art/environmental installations have a lasting effect on a community and its collective visions of the future?

We have identified four primary issues that face both of our regions:  Environment; Diversity and Connection; Creative Economies; Collective History and Education. Each submission must identify and uitilze at least one of these frames for their entry.

Entrants will design and present an approach to addressing this (above selected) issue using art, science, planning or other inventive means first at a regional scale. Then, focusing on one site (of your choice), designers/artists/teams will design a small-scale artistic/architectural/