heatwave: adapting public spaces to extreme weather

No one would dare dispute it: for the past few decades, European cities and countryside have been experiencing increasingly frequent heat waves in the summer (and even in other seasons!). These extreme weather conditions have a direct impact on our daily lives—rendering some public spaces unusable for several days, but also increasing the risk of forest fires and significantly raising the risk of death for people with underlying health conditions.

In France, as in Germany, we find ourselves having to adapt our behavior to temperatures that far exceed those we were used to in the last century. While, historically and culturally, the countries of southern Europe have learned to live with high temperatures, the situation is quite different in Paris, Berlin, Dortmund, Besançon, Lille, or Chemnitz—not to mention villages and suburban areas.

Faced with this growing problem, it is imperative to consider strategies for adaptation, gradual transformation, and the modernization of public spaces. The competition aims to enable everyone to continue using squares, parks, sidewalks, and the countryside during heat waves. While solutions already exist to address this situation, we are confident that many more ideas (even the most unconventional) can still emerge.

The HEATWAVE ideas competition  invites artists, architects, and designers—students or graduates, working individually or in groups—to choose a location that becomes unusable during heat waves. It can be in France or Germany, in a city or the countryside. Anything is possible, provided you demonstrate inventiveness to show that, with limited resources (but also with utopian and radical solutions), it is still possible to adapt our public spaces to a tragic climate future.