Karres en Brands has been awarded Second Prize at the City'Scape Award 2026, one of Europe's most respected international honours for landscape architecture, in the category Street Landscape & Slow Landscape: Slow Mobility, Bike Lanes, Traffic Calming. The prize recognises the Gooilandsingel, the central street of the Hart van Zuid area development in Rotterdam, for turning a piece of infrastructure into a green city street — and using that shift to set the rest of the area's transformation in motion.
The Gooilandsingel used to be exactly what its award category warns against: a road built for through-traffic, carrying more than 2,500 buses and taxis a day. Karres en Brands turned that logic around, adding green wherever possible: a promenade of dense planting and trees for walking and cycling, with terraces where people are invited to stay rather than pass through. That shift is what allowed the programme around it to change — an art house, a new swimming pool, restaurants and public facilities at street level. The redesigned bus and metro station nearby follows the same logic, with parking for 1,000 bikes.
Underneath that green surface runs a genuinely unique piece of infrastructure: a circular water system connecting the surrounding buildings, the public space and the neighbouring Zuiderpark into a single urban water buffer. Rainwater is collected in a crate storage facility beneath the street — a single downpour gathers 2.4 million litres — purified by plants and stored underground for use in dry periods. The system recycles around 20 million litres a year without needing a sewage treatment plant, supplying Rotterdam Ahoy and the Pathé cinema and saving an estimated 15,000 cubic metres of drinking water annually.
The filtered water resurfaces at the water square on Annie M.G. Schmidtplein — the first in the Netherlands where the fountains run entirely on locally filtered water. It also buffers rainwater during storms, releasing it slowly to relieve the sewer system, while doubling as a square to rest, walk and play on. Its organic forms, cut from natural stone, are an ode to Rotterdam's talent for reconstruction, with lines from a poem by Rotterdam poet Derek Otte set into the stone.
It is a project that puts into practice what Karres en Brands argues for at every scale it works: that landscape and public space are not decoration added after the engineering is done, but the catalyst for a wider transformation. The jury's recognition in Milan treats the Gooilandsingel as an example for how other cities might rethink their own infrastructure-dominated streets.
The award was presented on 18 September 2026 at the Triennale di Milano during the City'Scape Symposium. A partner from Karres en Brands travelled to Milan to accept the prize and present Hart van Zuid in a lecture, joining an international line-up of speakers.