International Living City Design Competition - People's Choice Award

The Living City Design Competition award winners were announced.  Of the 80 teams that participated, our team's submission "Symbiotic Districts: Towards a Balanced City" won a People's Choice Award.  This is an excerpt of the announcement from the International Living Future Institute's site:

The International Living Future Institute today announced the winners of the Living City Design Competition, which it hosted in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, at Living Future ‘11.  The competition called for teams worldwide to create powerful visualizations of how existing cities might be transformed to achieve and transcend the Living Building Challenge 2.0, the built environment’s most rigorous performance standard.

More than 80 teams submitted entries, addressing 69 different cities spanning 21 countries. Submissions were evaluated based on their ability to capture the attention and imagination of a broad audience and reassess assumptions about a future filled with high-tech, ecologically dislocated cities. Rather than constructing new cities from scratch, submissions also focused on the premise that a “living” future will rely on retrofitting the existing built environment and regenerating the evolutionary capacity of life.

“Each of the entries represented the crucial first steps in redefining our urban ecosystems and how they work in tandem with their natural environment,” said Jason F. McLennan, CEO of the International Living Future Institute and a member of the seven-person jury panel that selected the winners.  “This process was at least as important as the impressive end results.”

The team was led by ZGF and the Portland Sustainability Institute and included CH2M Hill, David Evans and Associates, Newlands and Company, Inc., Portland State University, Institute for Sustainable Solutions, and Sparling.

Congratulations to all our teammates on well deserved recognition.