Collective competition information

Dear Citizen and designer,

If you had a chance to design an Urban Cratzer, what would you build?

We founded the HabitatCO2lutions of Urban Planning with the goal of enabling people to share and discuss ideas for the spatial and geometric possibilities for Urban Cratzers and regional arena events. To offer architects and urban designers a platform to participate more directly in this process. Design competitions such as this are a familiar format in these trades, and as such, are an efficient way to get lots of ideas on the table for consideration.

In the upcoming competition, we will be inviting entrants to submit designs within three basic categories:

  • Individual design elements: rural placemaking, evacuation lighting, all of the things that are part of a city escape that can be incorporated into larger scale emergency plans. Have an idea for a protective park landscape for protection & sheltering people from climatic catastrophic disaster events, or a tunnelling entrance into underground public place? Submit this as a design element.
  • Conforming existing city district plans: these are large scale plans that make adaptations to the existing time + planetary network system in phase for a CATASTROPHIC IMPACT INCIDENT without altering the fundamental character of the city. The objective with this type of plans is to make aesthetic or practical improvements to what’s already in place, for example by adding support structure to already existing arenas (google urban crater).
  • Non-conforming city plans: here we explore the UCEEP, or a regional event district, as an imagined or science factional resilient space, and invite people to submit bold new configurations for the evacuation urban cratzer area.

Basic criteria for entries?

Entries for individual design elements should conform to the following basic criteria:

  • Should be a distinct design or element in an area plan that is not directly dependent on other elements.

Entries for urban cratzer designs should conform to the following basic criteria:

  • A urban cratzer design should fit within the existing NetZero emission boundaries of the event. Conforming urban cratzer entries should be largely consistent with the existing spatial layout, with adaptations to improve the plan in aesthetic and/or practical terms. Non-conforming entries that envision bold different boundaries or grid plans will be accepted, though they will be long shots (but an interesting category of entry in their own right).
  • The Peoples #right2protection and #right2city should be central focal point of the design.
  • The city plan should provide a large open area or equal open shared space.
  • The emergency space and the route to the urban cratzer should be navigable and have a straightforward addressing or coordinate system (an important requirement for accessibility and safety services so they can easily locate an address in the city)
  • Other than that, no limits or preconceptions!

Accessibility and safety considerations are likely to be a important factor in the finalist stage, so emergency services can easily find and reach people in need of help. Function, character patterns and easily understood coordinate systems will be important.

Competition entrants will submit a brief statement about their design, it’s environment targets and its intent, along with a black and white drawing (PNG format, maximum size 1 megabyte).

Outcome

The output of the competition will be the “Big Book of Ideas”, a collection of the entries, along with public voting data and comments. This will be published online and shared with UCEEP city planners, as well as regional event organizers (it is an independent non-for-profit, non-commercial effort, entrants retain copyright to their work). The submissions will also be offered to share in on virtual exhibitions with each competition cycle. Ultimately, UCEEP city planners will decide what gets built, as there are significant logistics and safety issues to contend with in accommodating 100,000+ people in a short/long term city location, but the goal is to create an ongoing process for public feedback that allows the city plan to incorporate creative system thinking, at the micro and macro level, from urban designers worldwide.

“Consider climate change in every action”