Hear this: Sudents around the world are invited to submit innovative solutions to the pressing environmental, social, and economic challenges confronting cities worldwide. The Urban SOS: Distressed Cities, Creative Responses competition, sponsored by EDAW AECOM, is offering $20,000 in prize money to encourage creative interventions that have potential for lasting improvement.
Areas with slum conditions (like in Manila) are one possible subject area for the Urban SOS competition.
“More than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas,” said Jason Prior, President of EDAW AECOM. “Well-executed cities are vibrant cultural, social and economic centers and offer hope for addressing climate change and resource scarcity. But in many urban places serious challenges affect quality of life, limit opportunities and perpetuate inequalities. We want to encourage students’ fresh ideas and creative solutions to a range of real issues.”
It is open to individual students or teams of up to four undergraduate and graduate students at all levels from all countries, in the design and planning fields – including landscape architecture, urban design, planning, architecture, landscape urbanism, economics, geography, engineering, environmental studies and related fields. In their submissions, students should address an actual site from any city in the world and develop an intervention that offers lasting improvement to problems ranging from economic collapse, environmental degradation, social disintegration, civil unrest, climate change or natural disaster.
The socioeconomic health of cities can also be addressed in the students’ proposals.
To participate, students must register and provide statements of intent by May 15, 2009; final board submissions are due July 31, 2009. Semi-finalists will be announced September 1, 2009. The semi-finalist teams will each be assigned a professional EDAW AECOM mentor who will work with the team to further articulate its proposed interventions. The top four finalists will travel to Barcelona, Spain to present their treatments to a jury panel at the World Architecture Festival in November 2009.
The Urban SOS competition is an evolution of the EDAW Intern Program. Since 1980, EDAW has guided students from around the world in holistic, cross-disciplinary approach to real-world projects involving issues of regional or international significance.
For more information, log on to www.edaw.com.
