THEMATIC ARCHIVE
WINNING PROJECTS FROM EUROPAN 1 TO 10

In the 10 sessions since the beginning of the Europan competition, there have been more than 1000 winning projects. Each session has between 50 and 70 sites, and the juries give, on average,  a hundred or more prizes to winners and runners-up. This output of winning proposals for the transformation of sites is, of course, a source of interesting ideas for solving spatial problems in specific urban contexts, but it also provides thematic answers to more generic questions about the evolution of European cities within the new paradigm and new values of sustainability. This material is usually analysed session by session in the National and European catalogues and events by experts and members of the juries or of the scientific committees. Until now, however, there has been no horizontal analysis of this huge mass of precious material.

This comparative presentation of the results of the ten sessions will be of interest not only to site representatives but also to a wider range of people. Students in their school or university project studios or seminars will have access to an analysis of the winners for use as a reference. Experts working at different levels (as teachers, researchers, consultants...) can use the projects as benchmarks or examples in their work. And also, of course, the people responsible for urban transformation (municipal representatives, developers, clients...) will be able both to find examples relating to specific questions they need to answer and have a quick way to access the different solutions proposed by Europan winners. They may also be interested in identifying European level teams to invite to take part in a competition on a specific question comparable to the issue they faced in Europan...

Because there is this wide range of interest in the results of the sessions after the competition, Europan has decided to produce a thematic archive of these winning ideas. Just as in each session, we compare the sites and hold comparative discussions by classifying the proposed sites within thematic categories, we have established main categories and themes within which projects are characterised by the way that they connect the generic theme of URBANITY to some specific themes of the sustainable city in terms of MOBILITY, USES, HOUSING, IDENTITY. Each of these 4 categories is divided into themes that in different ways reflect this specific relation. Each of the winning projects will be analysed through this framework, and will be included in a maximum of 3 themes matching the ideas developed in the design. For each of the themes, the project will be analysed, defined and illustrated in order to facilitate identification.

For people who want to ask a specific question and find projects that match it, there will be a search engine employing several criteria - location, sessions, themes - to generate a certain number of answers in different projects and across the different sessions. But there will also be a keyword search function, and finally a method for searching on themes in order to access all the projects classified in a particular category. This tool should enable a wide range of different people to make use of the huge numbers of ideas developed in the winning projects in the more than 20 years that the Europan competitions have now been running, with the emergence and development of new concerns and priorities in urban and architectural projects in European cities, in the era of a new sustainable approach.

Because this work is in progress, we hope to put these archives online, even if perhaps only partially to begin with, as soon as possible.

Didier Rebois
General Secretary of Europan