An international jury selected five finalists out of 326 projects from 35 countries. The European Prize for Urban Public Space is a biennial award which recognises the best public spaces in European cities. The award started in 2000 and is now in its 11th edition. The winner will be announced at a prize-giving ceremony in November at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).
1. Catharijnesingel, 2020. Utrecht, Netherlands
By OKRA
The restoration of the Catharijnesingel removes vehicular traffic that occupied this street and brings back water to rewild a new public space for the city and make it accessible for cyclists and pedestrians. This project is an excellent example of revitalizing the qualities of the city by means of recovering water and its biodiversity. Inspired by the environment, all the elements, including trees, vegetation, paving materials, and street furniture have been meticulously selected and envisage how nature will evolve in future. It introduces a new, natural, and healthy microclimate that will play an important role in the present situation of global climate crisis.
2. FLOW, 2021. Brussels, Belgium
By POOL IS COOL and Decoratelier Jozef Wouters
Flow, designed and built with the participation of fifty young people, is the first open-air swimming pool to be constructed in Brussels in forty years. This project introduces a temporary structure that establishes a rich meeting place for enjoying fresh air and water. As a simple, economical, modular system that can easily be built by many hands, it presents a good example of how everyone can participate in creating an active, healthy public space.
3. Hage, 2021. Lund, Sweden
By Brendeland & Kristoffersen architects and Price & Myers
Lund Cathedral decided to use its properties to develop a public space that would be an alternative to the logic of rapid urbanization in its surroundings. A courtyard, closed on three sides by walls made of bricks recovered from a demolished factory building, is set in still-undeveloped land on the outskirts of Lund. The owner of the land has decided not to keep pace with the urbanizing development of the area, but to let it follow its own course open to the citizens. The courtyard is a first intervention, an anticipation of a gradual evolution of the place: an hortus inconclusus.
4. Saint Sernin Square, 2020. Toulouse, France
By Joan Busquets, Pieter-Jan Versluys and BAU
The project for Saint Sernin Square in Toulouse restores eminence to the historic urban fabric of the city. The cars that occupied its surface have been removed, and lost trees are reinstated as organizers of the public space. The simplicity of the proposal, its use of materials, and recognition of the heritage of the site have become the project’s mechanisms for reactivating a new, once jeopardized public space and regaining its vertical dimension and establishing an area that can accommodate a range of public uses.
5. “Sporta pils dārzi”urban garden in Riga, 2021. Riga, Latvia
By Artilērijas dārzi
The urban community garden “Sporta pils dārzi” is the result of a popular initiative to recover an abandoned lot and becomes a new typology of public space. The project consists of a system of seedling distributions and interstitial spaces that will be occupied during events and encounters. The resulting project is a new system, a model of urban space that incorporates productive, cultural and social logics and integrates emerging natural elements as part of the community space.
