Emerging Designers + Planners
AECOM announced the winner of the Urban SOS: Distressed Cities, Creative Responses open ideas competition on November 5 at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona. She is Sabrina Kleinenhammans, a German national who recently finished graduate studies at MIT and was inspired to submit a creative response for conditions in Mumbai, India.
An evolution of Design + Planning at AECOM's (formerly EDAW) award-winning intern program, Urban SOS was a virtual competition open to all currently-enrolled undergraduate or graduate university students in design, architecture, planning, environmental or related fields. We asked them to find a crippled urban site, anywhere in the world suffering from the effects of economic decay, ecological degradation, social disintegration, climate change phenomena, or general neglect. We then asked students to submit interdisciplinary, creative and viable design and planning solutions for these places. In all, 1,050 student teams (1-4 members each) registered from more than 60 countries, representing nearly 240 universities and colleges. In the end, 396 of the teams completed full submissions.
After three rounds of judging over this summer and fall, involving dozens of AECOM practitioners of Design + Planning, the top five teams were invited to present refined schemes before a master jury at the World Architecture Festival. The jury included celebrated British designer Sir Peter Cook, Beirut-based architect Nabil Gholam, and Russian architect Vladimir Plotkin. From AECOM, they were joined by Jason Prior, Executive Director, Design + Planning, Bill Hanway, Managing Director, UK, and Christopher Choa, Principal, Design + Planning, London studio.
"The student competition was a great learning experience," says Jason Prior. "It's not only critical that we invest in the emerging generation of designers and planners, but that we find mechanisms where we can bring challenges—such as those brought on by global urbanization—back into our professional dialogue." It was under these auspices that AECOM's Design + Planning practice conceived and sponsored the Urban SOS competition.
Sabrina's proposal, entitled "In-Between Green: A Recreational Network for Mumbai's People," excited the jury for its directness, humility and authenticity. During the proceedings, Sir Peter Cook in particular was animated in his delight with Sabrina's work, noting that it stood out from the other submissions because it communicated a deep and genuine understanding of place and the people who live there. It felt genuine and full of life, Sir Peter remarked. Sabrina designed recreational, green corridors in unused strings of land found alongside rail and major road corridors. Typically these corridors aggressively bisect poverty-stricken neighborhoods; Sabrina proposes quietly converting them into a network of simple parks for local recreation and productive agriculture, employing local materials and modest construction.
As grand prize winner, Sabrina will receive $15,000. "Although I have traveled and worked abroad a lot, I had never before encountered such an environment," Sabrina says of Mumbai, which she visited in 2008. "It seemed that my understanding of cities and space had been turned upside-down."
In Mumbai, she was fascinated with how people appropriated built space in the most astonishing ways. For example, 60 percent of the city's residents walk as their only form of transport, but all sidewalks and pavements are not pedestrian-friendly because they are the valuable real estate for the stalls of street vendors by day, and the beds of sleeping poor by night. Sabrina saw children playing next to highways or highly polluted shipyards. There was nowhere for the typical Mumbaikar to experience the simple joy of a park. It was this simple idea that drove Sabrina to submit to the Urban SOS competition.
Sabrina received a Master's of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) from MIT this summer, and in 2002 graduated from the Peter Behrens School of Architecture in Dusseldorf in her native Germany. In the few years between her undergraduate and graduate studies, she worked with German firms HPP and Ortner & Ortner, volunteered with UN Habitat on an illustrative GIS manual for planners in developing countries, and had stints of work-travel in South Africa, Kenya and Luxembourg.
"My living and working experience in South Africa was the key moment in my life," said Sabrina. "It made me decide to go back to school to focus on more sustainable urban solutions for the less privileged in the developing world. Today, speed puts an immense pressure on each part of the planning process, especially in rapidly developing cities," she says, which often can result in copies of other places that neglect local culture and people. Sabrina hopes to take this passion for developing cities next year to Brazil, where she and her partner plan to relocate next year. In Brazil, the couple hopes to share knowledge and have the opportunity to work on creating socially, environmentally and spatially improved cities.
In addition to Sabrina's grand prize, two other finalist teams were recognized in Barcelona as "highly commended," each receiving $2,500. Olivier Woeffray (Université de Lausanne, Switzerland) and Miriam Fernàndez Ruiz (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain) were recognized for their organic regeneration of a waterside shantytown in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Stephanie Ulrich and Sahar Moin (University of Pennsylvania) were recognized for their proposal to create community agricultural landscapes between the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso (Mexico-USA) border.
"What's interesting about our top three entries," notes Jason "was that they all dealt with informal settlements."
Daniel Elsea