Neuchatel Waterfront park, Europan, Neuchatel, Switzerland

Parque de borde del lago Neuchatel, Europan, Neuchatel, Suiza
Collaborators: Bruno Pereira, Daniela Tramontozzi, Tomas Clara, Manuel Tojal, Dasha Vaimberg 
How can we imagine the park for the 21st century be? Which role should it play in the contemporary city? What should its programmatic content be? Public spaces are the primary conduits and rooms for collective participation in the fabric of the City. A City without varied and exciting public spaces would be little more than an automated fabric of individual cells and private lives. The challenge today is to keep public space integral to the very structuring and use of the City.
Most of the parks built on the 20th century continued the 19th century inertia, understanding landscape just as a decorative element. Urban parks were contemplative areas, where landscape was used to build an envelope for leisure, this being understood as walking, sitting and feeling outside the industrial city, therefore, close to nature. The parks for the 21st century respond to a new understanding of the city, and consequently they should be active urban components, key elements in the city configuration on its daily life; they should be incorporated as activity and production nodes, and hence not only as thematic pedestrian walks
The incredible potential of the site relies both on its location next to the city center and to the lake; its natural and landscape components (lake, beach, waterfront, Alps’ view and more) are a remarkable value that should be transformed into an opportunity. Its current condition as an urban remnant (lack of program, topographic barrier and problematic scale) can be transformed to shape a new attraction pole. Understanding and incorporating the complexity existing in the urban context, as well as looking for the right strategies to embrace the qualities of the existing landscape, is key in order to link the site to the urban structure and transform it into a new node of energy for the city, the new Neuchâtel.

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