AECOM, Van Alen Institute and 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) on Wednesday launched a new ideas competition calling on multidisciplinary teams of students worldwide to identify risks to urban food, energy or water systems and offer strategies that make these systems more efficient, equitable and accessible to diverse populations.
The sixth annual Urban SOS: All Systems Go competition challenges participants to visualize a systemic food, energy or water infrastructure problem and its consequences, as well as realistic opportunities for intervention, including a prototype of one or more of their strategies that could be realized within the next 12 months. AECOM says it will make available $25,000 of cash and in-kind staff time to support the implementation of the prototype.
Three short-listed teams will be invited to present their proposals before an interdisciplinary panel at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles in October 2015. The competition jurors will award $15,000 in prizes, which may be divided among one or more teams.
The jury at the A+D Museum event will include: Claire Bonham-Carter, vice president of Design + Planning at AECOM; Stephen Engblom, senior vice president of Cities at AECOM; David van der Leer, executive director of Van Alen Institute; Bryna Lipper, vice president of 100RC; and Mimi Zeiger, co-president of Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. The jury will be chaired by Bill Hanway, AIA, executive vice president of Global Architecture at AECOM.
Urban infrastructure increasingly is at risk due to extreme weather, the impacts of climate change and social and economic strife, AECOM says. In New York City, for example, if storms or a labor dispute were to disable the food distribution hub at Hunts Point for any significant length of time, 22 million people throughout the region would be left with less than three days’ worth of food. Despite the importance and vulnerability of these systems, too often, adequate attention isn’t paid to pipelines, power grids and food supply chains until they fail.
Late last year, AkzoNobel, The Nature Conservancy, Risk Management Solutions and Veoliajoined the 100RC initiative to provide critical tools to help cities around the world become more resilient to the shocks and stresses that are a growing part of the 21st century. These tools will be made available to members of 100RC's Network, and will be used to help design and implement the cities' long term resilience plan.
Speaking of resilient cities, the Vermont city of Burlington announced last year it acquires all of its energy from renewable sources, including wind, hydro, and biomass, after the recent purchase of the 7.4-megawatt Winooski One hydroelectric project. The city of 42,000 people, through the Burlington Electric Department, will get around one-third of its power from a biomass facility that primarily uses wood chips from logging residue; one-third from wind energy contracts; and one-third from the hydroelectric stations Winooski One and Hydro-Québec.