Recent Daniels Faculty Master of Urban Design graduates Negin Akhlaghpour and Juan Caviedes have been announced the winners of the 2014 SymbioticCities International Design Ideas Competition for their project "Responsive City." The runner up in the competition, Tawab Hlimi graduated from the Faculty with a Master of Landscape Architecture in 2009. Both submissions explored ways to help improve the resilience and adaptability of cities to challenges associated with climate change. (Both were also featured on the website bustler.)

Akhlaghpour and Caviedes’ project, "Responsive City," looked at the municipality of Barranquilla, Colombia, “the largest city serving port and maritime transportation in the Northern Caribbean Coast region of Colombia.” Their plan for the site included mixed-use development, urban agriculture, a greenbelt, and sustainable energy technology such as wind turbines, which would  give the city flexibility to respond to various “social, environmental and economic” needs and changes.

Jury member Scott Torrance commended the project for exploring increased “urban density without the use of towers,” while Craig Applegath, from DIALOG, the firm that sponsored the event, remarked that Akhlaghpour and Caviedes’ submission “very effectively integrates the key symbiotic city components of carbon-free energy, urban food, waste-water recycling and recycled materials in a very compelling manner.”

Images from Akhlaghpour and Caviedes’ project can be viewed in the gallery below.

The goal of the SymbioticCity competition is to challenge planners, urban designers, architects, landscape architects, engineers, and ecologists to develop ideas "to transform our existing cities into more resilient, climate adaptive, regenerative, symbiotic cities,” ones that have mutually beneficial relationships with their macro and micro ecosystems.

Tawab Hlimi’s project, "Garrison Creek Redux," involved creating a “network of stormwater swales along city laneways, parking lots, sidewalks and plazas” to treat stormwater, recharge the groundwater, mitigate the risk of flooding, and provide a habitat for pollinators, among a number of other other benefits. The rendering above shows a plaza at grade and a Riprian Landscape below.

Participating jury members for the competition included:

• Craig Applegath, Co-moderator of SymbioticCities.net and Architect and Principal at DIALOG, Toronto, Canada
• Rahul Mehrotra, Director of Planning and Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Boston, USA
• Scott Torrance, Landscape Architect at Scott Torrance Landscape Architect, Toronto, Canada
• Justin Ritchie, Co-Director of Extraenvironmentalist.com, UBC Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability, Vancouver, Canada
• Jeff Schnurr, Executive Director at Community Forests International, Pemba, Tanzania
• Josh Taylor, Program Coordinator at Catalyst Community Development Society, Vancouver, Canada

For more information on the competition and additional images of the winning entries, visit the SybioticCities website.