Van Alen Institute is pleased to introduce the international competition Future Ground and is accepting submissions for innovative strategies for vacant land reuse in New Orleans.
Future Ground is a design competition inviting multidisciplinary teams – landscape design, architecture, planning, public policy, and other related fields – to generate flexible design and policy strategies to reuse vacant land in New Orleans, transforming abandoned landscapes into resources for the current and future city.
The project will produce implementable, replicable solutions that NORA: The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority can apply to specific sites citywide, and can help catalyze change in cities around the world.
Three teams will be awarded $15,000 to participate in a six-month research and design process. Working closely with local stakeholders and national experts, teams will forecast changes in density, demand, and climate over the next half-century in New Orleans, and will tackle the social, economic, and ecological challenges underlying reuse of the most prevalent types of vacant land in the city.
Future Ground will develop strategies to bring small, piecemeal projects to:
- scale at the neighborhood and citywide level;
- craft policy to support promising design strategies;
- make these strategies flexible and participatory enough to be sustained into the next generation; and
- share resources with a growing network of innovators who are reusing vacant land in cities around the country.
