City Visions Europe: Bordeaux, Košice, Mechelen and Plzen
European Exchange Program - Conference and Exhibition
City Visions Europe is a design-research program focusing on the urban condition of four mid-scale European cities. It offers the framework for exchange between architects and cities to develop, present, and debate speculative architectural ideas on the future of these cities as well as the European city in general. On the 23rd and 24th of april 2009, the program will be launched in Mechelen, Belgium, with the conference New vocabularies for the European City and the exhibition History and Future of the European City.
The European exchange program City Visions Europe contains the development of sixteen speculative architectural projects for the mid-size European cities of Bordeaux (France), Kosice (Slovak Republic), Mechelen (Belgium) and Pilzen (Czech Republic). The development and presentation of these projects, developed by eight European architectural practices, will provoke a concrete debate amongst and between city-governments, specialists and citizens about the future of their city, and about the notion of the European city as such.
This 18-month program, running from autumn 2008 to spring 2010, is initiated by the Berlage Institute’s Centre for Architectural Research and Development (BI-CARD, Rotterdam), together with the Centre for Central European Architecture (Prague), arc en rêve centre d’architecture (Bordeaux), MMMechelen (Mechelen) and the Flemish Architecture institute (Antwerp).
The eight selected offices who will address the challenges of the four represented cities are l’AUC (Paris, FR), Berger&Berger (Paris, FR), GGNA (Bratislava, SK), Jan De Vylder architecten (Ghent, BE), Office KGDVS (Brussels, BE), Raumbureau (Zürich, CH), RKAW (Prague, CZ) and zerozero+totalstudio (Presov, SK). A series of conferences and seminars held in each of the four cities, together with public lectures, exhibitions, and publications, complete the program.
The first City Visions Europe conference, New Vocabularies for the European City, on the 23rd and the 24th of April at the Lamot Congress & Heritage Centre in Mechelen, looks back at historical examples, considers recent projects and ongoing developments, and exposes the challenges of contemporary architecture in building the European city. The conference departs from the observation that the search for exceptionality and continuous formal renewal define the current architectural trend, although cities in Europe are generally known for the relative architectural coherence of their city-parts and, related to this, the continuity of their public spaces. While the ‘urban project’ is often the engine of urban restructuring, it has also become the vehicle for city-marketing strategies and the pursuit of a ‘Bilbao-effect’ in both large and small cities.
The exhibition History and Future of the European City seeks to highlight some of the most representative and peculiar aspects of the contemporary mid-scale European city. By focusing on the four subject-cities of City Visions Europe and on the city of Mons, it reflects on the past of the European city to open up possibilities for the project of the European city of the 21st century. Composed of historical maps, contemporary realizations and architectural and urban projects developed for these cities, the exhibition presents a provocative reading of our common history. A series of photographs by the young Dutch photographer Dieuwertje Komen portrays the contemporary urban condition of the two mid-scale Belgian cities Mechelen and Mons.
