Karres en Brands together with Adept, Argus and Metabolic submitted their final proposal for a competition ‘Land Stadt + Feld’ as one of three teams chosen for a second phase. For the past few months our team worked on creating a future orientated urban district with environmentally friendly perspective towards new ways of living with landscape at your door. The adapted planning proposals were presented on a public forum on 27th of November where citizens had an opportunity to talk to the individual teams directly and enter the dialogue about the future of their city.
In Woodhood, the basic structure of the area is defined by the landscape and the cultural history of the place. It draws inspiration from the history of settlement, nature and the surrounding forests, its framework is defined by landscape, planting, the use of water, the play of sun and shade and the ever-changing seasons.
Woodhood connects the large-scale landscape structures with one another and thus creates a varied network of different landscapes with their own characteristics. This new natural infrastructure permeates the entire area and links recreational spaces with ecological corridors - anchoring Woodhood in its context. The future landscape that surrounds, frames, permeates and connects Woodhood to Blumenberg, is a patchwork of all these landscape types, which will be made accessible and usable for the new residents and visitors.
The hoods take up the various settlement islands of the past decades as a theme, transform them into an independent typology and at the same time link them to this very stock in a dense network of spatial and functional connections. In contrast to the conventional model of centralised urbanity, Woodhood is structured as a polycentric ecosystem of hoods, the Kreuzfelder Hoods. Each hood has its own identity and profile. Taken as a whole, they form a coherent city, which is unobtrusively but firmly docked to the existing buildings in Blumenberg. A dense network of interlinked paths for slow-mobility and loops connects the hoods to each other and to the neighborhood via the most important sports, play, park, educational and recreational facilities.
Garden City 2.0. is an innovative approach to planning ensuring a vibrant place for living, working and recreation used by residents and visitors from surrounding districts. It encourages a healthy, sustainable lifestyle and the strengthening of communities at different levels creates a strong social network that integrates all residents into the urban community. Woodhood creates a new relationship with surrounding landscape and becomes a new definition of a landscape city.
In mid-December, jury will gather again to choose the winning concept which will be followed by public exhibition of all proposals.
Renders: Vivid Vision