Global Award for Sustainable Architecture

Why the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture?

The unseen economic, ecological, social and cultural challenges facing contemporary societies are being addressed by architects and planners as they search for a new definition of progress and the right bal-ance between man and the environment. The understanding of design as a collective process based on shared ethics, methods and experiments has been rewarded since 2007 by the Global Award for Sus-tainable Architecture™, an honour created by the architect and professor Jana Revedin in partnership with international scientific institutions and the Cité de l´Architecture of Paris. The award received the pat-ronage of UNESCO in 2011. This year the LOCUS scientific jury received more than 200 entries submit-ted by architects and planners, critics, academics, government officials and architectural associations from every continent. Rather than offering financial rewards, the award seeks to establish a community based on dialogue and the exchange of knowledge and visions - a think-tank that, over time, has become a do-tank and driver of change.

A community for change

The LOCUS Foundation, founded in 2009 to maintain the scientific independence of the Global Award, works on two levels to accomplish its mission of “Innovation and Transmission for Architecture and the City”. Firstly, LOCUS coordinates field research in urban analysis with interdisciplinary students and re-searchers from partner universities as a means of bridging the gap between academic knowledge and social engagement while introducing a sense of academic social responsibility. Then, in a second phase of such research projects “in the field” of suffering urban environments, LOCUS sets up design workshops “with the people by the people”, following participatory methods in line with the research pro-gramme “The radicant city: participatory design for social inclusion” developed by professor Jana Revedin at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. Collective creativity is catalysed through the dialogue be-tween inhabitants, users and stakeholders, local associations and NGOs. For every participatory LOCUS urban renewal project, the local community defines its most urgent need and invites a Global Award winner to share its experience and engagement in addressing their specific problem. The projects and publications, despite their small scale and slow rhythm, then enter into the col-lective memory, becoming emblematic signs of change. A change that, in the long run, aims to lead to empowerment, self-development and civic rights: the human rights to adequate living space and to the city.

LOCUS research and participatory projects

Since 2009, LOCUS has realised such experimental participatory projects in the Fishing Harbour of Zhoushan (with Wang Shu, Global Award 2007), the Garbage City in Cairo (with Bijoy Jain, Global Award 2009) and the Vale Encantado Favela in Rio de Janeiro (with Kevin Low, Global Award 2013). The latest participatory project could be located in Casablanca’s Sidi Moumen slum following the successful LOCUS powered entry to the UN Habitat competition on the urban renewal of mass housing in April 2014: the team of master’s students from Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden and ENA Rabat were global winners with their radicant design proposal “Sidi Moumen: from Terror Slum to Open City”. LOCUS is supported by the GDF-SUEZ Foundation and BOUYGUES Batiment International.

Award winners

References

External links

• LOCUS Fund
• Global Award for Sustainable Architecture