European Prize for Urban Public Space 2024

The CCCB announces the 12th edition of the European Prize for Urban Public Space. 

The European Prize for Urban Public Space is a biennial competition organised with the aim of recognising and making known all kinds of works to create, recover and improve public spaces in European cities.

In this year’s award, the Prize has two distinct categories:

1. The general category aims to evaluate interventions in public space which took place between 2022 and 2023 with the exception of projects related with transformation of seafronts
2. Seafront category: Given the challenges faced by cities that are open to the sea as a consequence of the climate change, this category aims to assess projects of transforming, recovering, and creating seafronts over the last five years, from 2019 to 2023 inclusive.

The Prize, the only one of its kind in Europe, promotes debate abouturban responses to challenges such as climate emergency, the increase in inequalities and the impact of technological transformations. Exceptionally, this year it incorporates Seafronts, in response to the particular vulnerability
of coastal cities to climate change.

The president of this year’s jury is Beth Galí, a Barcelona-born architect, urban planner, landscape architect and industrial designer. Organized by the CCCB, the Prize involves the collaboration of a network of 10 architecture and urban planning institutions, and over 50 experts from across the continent.

The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) announces the call for entries for the 12th European Prize for Urban Public Space. This honorary biennial competition, which since 2000 has acknowledged the best interventions in the creation, transformation and recovery of public space in European cities, will distinguish works carried out between 2022 and 2023 in its general category. The call is open from 5 March to 16 April.

The Prize is the only one in Europe dedicated to public space, and is awarded to both the project designers and developers. Its main purpose is to reflect the role that issues such as shortages, inequalities, mobility, migrations, or climate emergency and the impact of new technologies have on the urban design of public space; and to be an observatory of good practices that proposes solutions for a future in which cities will play a leading role in defining society’s evolution.

Category: Seafronts

In the present-day context of climate crisis, in which coastal cities are laboratories for rethinking the city and the way of inhabiting it in the face of the challenges posed by rising sea levels and extreme climate phenomena, this year the Prize incorporates Seafronts into its usual categories. The jury will evaluate works centring on the transformation, recovery or creation of seafronts carried out between 2019 and 2023.

Organization and Planned Calendar

From all the projects presented in the general category, the international jury will select 25, of which five will be the finalists of the edition, along with another five from the Seafronts category. All of them will form part of the Prize’s Archive. The finalists will present their work at an event open to the public to be held on 28 October at the CCCB. After the jury’s deliberation, the winning works in both categories will be announced at the awards ceremony on 29 October.

Details: https://www.publicspace.org/