NEB Prizes 2022: All Applications

A proposal to explore a process for appropriating and adapting Malta’s existing stormwater management networks for human mobility, public space, urban greening and connectivity. Such a proposal promotes the following benefits, amongst others.

- A cultural shift towards the mindset of a walkable city through human community and empowerment.

- A real solution for decarbonisation and achieving the 15-minute city.

- Addressing climate change on a local scale.

-Promoting end of life reusage

The vast majority of bike sharing users do not wear helmets when riding on the roads. This creates a potential risk in case of accidents. People do not wear helmets because they are too heavy and take up too much space in the backpack for a short trip. 

The air helmet, made from recycled material wastes, solves the problem of portability during the rest of the day. So the user can go lighter, but safer.

The Austrian city of Linz is very unique in terms of industrial output and energy demand.Without it's industrial sector, the city of ~220.000 inhabitants needs ~4 TWh of energy/year.
Adding the local industry the energy demand rises to ~40 TWh/year or more than 10% of austrias overall consumption.
With our project "Local Energy City & Industry" we want to raise global awareness to such challenges.
Because time is running out, we allready started working on solutions - and that's exciting.

Torino Urban Eco Hub (UEH) is a project of urban regeneration centered on sustainability. The main aim is to requalify a disused urban real estate to provide a physical location for an ecosystem of people working on sustainability. Torino UEH will be a coworking space, but most importantly will be a center to develop a network and to share knowledge, methods and best practices on sustainable processes, starting from Turin and then connecting people around Italy and Europe.

Unito is a modular chair that stores CO2 in its materials. The chair consists of blocks of bioplastic made from atmospheric carbon; 1 kg carbon per block. The result is a hefty 42 kg chair that was designed to last forever. The chair is reconfigurable and adaptable to remain relevant for centuries to come, ensuring long-term carbon storage in the built environment. The Unito chair is part of an approach to production that could be scaled across many different industries and sectors of society.

INCLUD is a digital platform that assesses a building’s performance according to Universal Design principles through a new automatic framework of objective indicators. The tool supports designers with effective strategies for both new projects and building renovations, while also guiding decision making processes to enhance inclusive and accessible environments for everyone’s diversities and disabilities. INCLUD has already been tested in Italy.

Mapa is a participatory art project in the form of a GPS webapp where games and technology come together to meet the urgent need to regenerate the environmental responsibility of the population in the face of the climate emergency that we inhabit.

Mapa is designed to boost citizen participation by engaging the community around locating and recovering degraded nature environments as well as facilitating cultural and wellbeing activities like sensorial discovery games and seasonal plants routes.

The Landscape-City is a new form of city that places open space at its core. It is a form of dilated city that is able to hold together different patches of contemporary life because it re-infrastructs itself starting from the open spaces, building a hierarchical grid spread throughout the territory, a grid of slow paths, tree-lined rows, wooded belts and green parterres that are vectors of diffused urbanity and naturalness and not of urbanisation.

Nowadays it is difficult to recognize natural food. The concept, based on personal experience, aims to re-establish a connection between the human being and the nature. Foraging becomes the focus of this dialogue. The project aims to stimulate and make the user more aware of the importance of the food that nature offers us. The concept, starting from a conservative foraging, plans to guide the user by transforming an outdoor experience into a domestic indoor one.

The project aims to activate regenerative processes of a wasteland, regaining its resilience. By leaning on the region’s tradition of craftsmanship, an abandoned sanatorium will be rehabilitated thanks to its future users’ skills. The place will thus become a cradle for the perpetuation of these local know-hows. By collectively planning, designing, testing and constructing, we aspire to materialise a collaborative vision of the site’s transformation.