‘POROUS CITY’
Restricted competition for residential development in Braunschweig, Germany
How to configure a city that increasingly presents itself as a complex and changing reality?
We do not propose a subdivision or a pre-designed urban fabric, but rather a process of controlled growth: a network of urban supports manages the buildability over time, showing in the competition only a hypothesis of what it could become. The result will be a porous fabric with a low ecological footprint; a chemical composition of urban elements, with a diversity of building scales open to the different actors involved in urban planning.
The new fabric 'solidifies' at the edges, creating continuity on the streets that limit vehicular traffic, and 'sponges' in the center, creating an area for pedestrians and bicycles defined by a hierarchy of free spaces: a large public green space programmed in continuity with the linear park and a succession of smaller free spaces under community management, open to collective design, temporary appropriation, and reprogramming over time, which will define the identity of the new neighborhood.