Quite a few modern and progressive cities have once buried their first axes – the rivers that witnessed their birth. Ambitious cities today are exhuming the soil-covered or culverted waterways, bringing them back to life. With this idea competition, we invite everyone to imagine the new life forms of unearthed urban streams.
ANTI-STREAMLINING
The rivers and streams of rich benefits, on the banks of which settlements once arose, ironically became a nuisance in the course of urbanisation because of bad smell, flooding, taking up land with development value and providing habitats for mosquitoes and other irritating bugs. In contrast to their ancient paths, many urban streams are now piped or culverted and like a great deal of other modern man-made routes do not follow the course of the landscape, but cut straight through it. The uniform spatial environment and canalised flow washes away whats in its path, simplifying the ecosystems around it. Freely flowing streams, however, have a tendency to meander, slow down now and again and deeply scour the nearby banks over time – not thus yielding to desires for a frictionless flow. Here, the prerequisite of life is constant obstruction: the changing speed of the flow, the varying depth of the riverbed, diverse vegetation and various obstacles in the way of the water create favorable conditions for many critters who live among, around and beneath us. Besides, the water is naturally purified when the dirt settles behind the obstacles. Stream banks have the potential to become some of the most species-rich places in cities.
The growing discussion over the loss of biodiversity has led several cities to seek out and unearth streams that were once buried. Daylighting creeks can also be seen as an alternative to piped rainwater management systems and may fit better with the changing climate and increasingly violent rainfalls.
Besides supporting urban wildlife and water management, urban streams have an intense atmospheric element. Rivers and rivulets seem to have a life force of their own. The sound, movement and smell of the water sinously burbling through the landscape entice the senses and lay a mythical layer on the urban landscape. Like streams in folk tales, could urban creeks also be fantastical places where caddisflies and frogs meet with nymphs, fairies, vagabunds, children on adventure and teenagers trying their first cigarettes?
When daylighing an urban river, the once natural, then entombed riverbed must be re-designed. Though oftentimes manmade environments are lifeless and primitive in terms of ecosystems, there are also examples of seminatural environments such as wooded meadows where the human intervention leads to more diverse ecosystem. Could the artificial river bed become even more biodiverse than the natural once was? Could it be more than nature, a sort of hyper-nature? This connects to the idea of Arcadia, an ideal, utopian landscape. Throughout the history, Arcadia has been depicted either as wild and shadowy grove of obscure desires, a place of unexpected adventures, or more famously, as an idyllic, cultivated and pastoral landscape, from which everything wild has been banished. The depiction of Arcadia as a symbolic place has been changing together with the values and longings of societies. What would the arcadia of our times look like?
DAYLIGHTING THE PEPPER STREAM
Valga, located on the border of southern Estonia, is a small town full of streams and springs, where the sound of water can be heard in several places. But, like in many other cities, several creeks have been channeled into underground pipes in the last century which is why they have lost a large part of their variety of life. The municipality has now taken the direction of opening city streams and restoring them as species-rich habitats.
The competition seeks to collect spatial visions for daylighting the Pepper stream (Pipraoja), which runs through the centre of Valga, with the aim of emphasising its presence in the cityscape, making it an attractive recreation area for people and enhancing the variety of life found there. Participants are expected to propose a landscape concept and trajectory for the stream and/or small-scale architectural interventions which would create meeting points for humans and various other life forms to be found near the streams.
PRACTICALITIES
Competition period April 15 – April 22. On April 15 the competition brief, the base materials and the submission form will be published here. The proposals must be submitted no later than April 22.
Participants are expected to submit 3 images (illustration, plans, schemes, etc) and a text.
Entries must be submitted on TANDEEMS online platform.
Event launch + lectures on April 5. The lectures will be uploaded here.
Three winner will receive monetary prize.
The competition is part of the ‘Flock of Ideas’ series of idea competitions
The competition is organised by Valga Architecture Residence VARES in cooperation with the Latvian idea competition platform TANDEEMS and Valga municipality.
Questions: [email protected]