RUNNER UP

Project Description by Team: A Landscape of Havens reimagines the L202 from a car-dominated barrier into a regenerative corridor where mobility, ecology, and daily life coexist. Based on user portraits, fieldwork, and spatial analysis, the project introduces “Havens”: site-specific interventions supporting care, transition, and activation. These nodes, linked by blue-green infrastructures, turn traffic impact to easy accessibility, enhance local identity, and restore ecological connectivity. Havens integrate multimodal hubs, quiet zones, social and cultural living spaces, productive edges and climate-adaptive design. They are forming a flexible, place-based strategy to transform infrastructure into a shared landscape of resilience, memory and community.

Jury Statement: "The project evolves the idea of the L202 as an infrastructure of care into a poetic yet systematically structured proposal. The road is conceived as a sequence of “havens”—spatial harbours of calm, encounter, and resource sharing—that interweave ecological, social, and mobility-related qualities within a coherent framework. The team convincingly translates this metaphor into a set of strategic guidelines and concrete spatial interventions positioned along the axis. 

The twelve distinct havens form a structured Catalogue of Havens, in which each intervention—whether green, blue, or social—responds precisely to its local context. Along the L202, multimodal mobility hubs, new cycling and walking connections, and landscape spaces emerge, enhancing climate resilience and the overall quality of public life. The methodological clarity of the project is remarkable: from conceptual framework to street section, it demonstrates strong coherence and a consistent design language. 

The project’s thorough analysis of the industrial and cultural history of the region is especially noteworthy. By integrating local production traditions—from textiles to engineering—into a sustainable spatial strategy, the proposal builds a bridge between heritage and future. Equally convincing is the thorough treatment of ecological themes such as microclimate, flood-prone zones, and noise mitigation, all embedded in a robust nature-based approach. 

Despite its strong methodological foundation, it remains open whether the metaphor of the “haven” as a place of calm fully captures the dynamic complexity of the transformation at hand. Nevertheless, the project stands out as a poetic yet analytically sound contribution—carefully developed, coherent, and inspiring as a vision for the future of the L202.“