"It's about all these young people, 1,000 of them in the landscape, urban design, and planning professions, who want to speak to us about their distressed communities."

Distressed Cities, Creative Responses

Cities are the future. More than half the world's people live in them, making cities the most effective vehicle for positive social and environmental change. If we get our cities right, a whole host of issues – from the looming specter of climate change to the disruptions of economic downturn to the health of our communities and people – can be greatly influenced.

That is why this year we have organized the Urban SOS: Distressed Cities, Creative Responses open ideas competition. Urban SOS is an innovation of EDAW AECOM's award-winning student program, which began in 1980. The competition has asked university and post-graduate students worldwide who are currently enrolled in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, environmental studies, geography and related fields to submit a solution for an urban site in disrepair. Specifically, the brief asks participants to present a multi-disciplinary and creative solution to a problematic urban site measuring 5-100 hectares. Students must tackle sites that are facing ecological degradation, social disintegration, economic collapse, climate change threat, the impact of natural disaster or civil unrest. It's a tall order.

Worldwide participation
Traditionally, EDAW's intern program attracts 300 or so applications. This year, 1,050 students applied to participate in the Urban SOS competition. The diversity of applicants and sites has been truly astonishing: 64 countries are represented, and students from 239 universities and colleges are participating. Students must submit their final submissions via our online portal. Throughout August, we will narrow the applicant pool to four finalists, who will be invited to present refined proposals at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, on the 5th of November before an international jury. With US$20,000 in prize money at stake, the judges will select and announce the winner in Barcelona.

Why Urban SOS? Why now?
"We recognize that many urban issues are about the informal economy, the poor, the dispossessed and challenged communities," says EDAW AECOM President Jason Prior. "This is our way of exploring these issues and learning from them so we are better equipped as a practice to respond to all members of city communities."

We are in age of re-tooling. Our long-held assumptions about the relationship between man and nature are defunct. We now know that we can no longer continue to build without concern for the long term impact. Energy and natural resources are finite. The way we configure economies has come into question. In the developed world, especially in the United States, infrastructure and the notions that underpin it are outdated. Meanwhile, in the developing world, especially in countries like China and India, rapid change in lifestyles and economies for billions of people, require a whole new way of planning human settlement. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, all these significant land-based challenges have come to the fore. It is a design + planning perfect storm. We need to re-design and re-plan our cities – both ecology and economy depend on it. "Re-" is the prefix of the time.

The Urban SOS program is our laboratory of experimentation for this re-fabricating of the urban environment. It is an opportunity to explore pressing urban problems in a raw and direct way, tapping into youthful enthusiasm and idealism. It will introduce us to interesting sites and places worldwide, and it is connecting our practice to the world's best and brightest students.

Sites: South Africa to Seoul
The sites that students have proposed to us speak for themselves. A few samples: A former trash and waste dump located in Lahore, Pakistan; a string of nine separate derelict, vacant lots in the Mitte and Kreuzberg neighborhoods in Berlin; a crime-ridden, poverty-stricken group of apartment blocks in Bloemfontein, South Africa; a town on the Israeli-Gaza border that is besieged by rocket fire; a polluted river bank in the heart of the Colombian capital Bogotá; a back bay slum in Mumbai; an industrial wasteland on the fringes of Seoul; a heavily trafficked neighborhood in Tehran; a derelict suburb in Iowa; a crowded informal settlement in Ghana; and an empty waterfront in the Dutch port of Rotterdam.

"It's a remarkable outpouring of communication about design ideas and urbanism globally. We are in such a global era," notes Joe Brown, chief executive of AECOM's planning, design + development business line, "and it's not about one country or three countries being the axis of power. It's about all these young people, 1,000 of them in the landscape, urban design, and planning professions, who want to speak to us about their distressed communities."

Daniel Elsea