Urban SOS

AECOM is seeking submissions for our fifth student competition. The theme of this year’s competition is Urban SOS: Towards a New Industry. We are seeking integrated design, planning, environmental studies and engineering proposals in any urban context that relates to or improves the relationship between industry and urban development worldwide.

Projects take the form of a creative urban design, landscape, architectural or engineering solution that reimagines the challenges related to an abandoned factory or place of production.

Proposals should identify a city with a derelict piece of infrastructure and develop an inspiring economically viable concept that reanimates part or the entire site. Students are encouraged to consider the potential for making and production to be a driving force for urban growth.

Each proposal must address and attempt to answer the following questions:

Growth: How does this project support productive, sustainable and innovative growth? What do you make? What services do you provide? What do you trade with other parts of the world? What?

Asset improvement: How does the proposal build upon the city’s existing assets and infrastructure?

Revitalization: How does this intervention revitalize its context?

Collaboration: How does this intervention engage with local networks of leaders and institutions? What is its relationship with local businesses and philanthropic entities?

Technology: How does the project explore the line between contemporary technologies of production and outdated industry? Does it demonstrate an interest in repurposing cast-off technologies and materials in ways that consider the evolution of technology and the roles technology and industry play in our lives and our cities?

Benefit: How does the project benefit the city’s residents?

Responses can range from a strategic framework to a surgical micro-response, from a whole landscape system to a single piece of architecture. Entrants should demonstrate a holistic and sustainable approach to their proposals. They should present a connective language that can embrace many or all aspects of the site, expressing a language of built form that ties together land, buildings, ecology, infrastructure, and economic and social activity to strategically transform a site. We are asking for professional responses to challenging questions. Judges will value creativity and innovation, but your response must be fundamentally feasible.