Grau

In June 2011, 10 teams met at the city hall of Gothenburg to participate in an international workshop on the renewal of the city center and its evolution over the next 70 years. Together with Lars Lerup, Elioth and Idea Consult, we were one of the invited teams.

In recent years the city of Gothenburg has seen its industrial port move outwards to the sea and is now left with very large land reserve at its very center. Located at the edge of the sea and cut in half by the Göta River, the city is very vulnerable to water: climate change and rising sea levels will strongly influence how it will evolve. Water rise concerns everyone, but most directly delta cities, which are threatened from multiple directions.

Gothenburg is a fragmented city : the large Göta River, the abundant infrastructure (designed to the scale of a large port city and not a city of 500 000 inhabitants) and the topography (a landscape of ridges and valleys shaped by the receding inland ice) have produced distance within the city and allowed it to develop in a fragmented way, with clusters of developments growing like mushrooms.

Instead of trying to connect all the fragments with expensive infrastructure the projects tries to strengthen the inherent quality of each fragment, imagining that connections will then start developing between them but in a more rich and multiple way.

In addition to this approach, a toolbox proposes a series of light design solutions, small floating and energy devices, that can be implemented starting tomorrow.

The «masterplan» illustrates the specificity of each fragment, its approach toward water rise and shows the floating and energy devices (in red).