Reclaiming the streets: the architects clawing back Europe’s car-centric spaces — SkimNews
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- European Prize for Urban Public Space released its latest shortlist on Wednesday, highlighting five architectural projects that convert car infrastructure into spaces designed for heatwaves and extreme rainfall.
- Leopold Banchini's Round About Baths in Logroño, Spain turned a concrete roundabout with a broken fountain into a timber-clad splash pool and steam room — but the structure stood for only one week during the Concéntrico architecture festival in June 2025.
- Barcelona's Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes partially buried three cloverleaf thoroughfares underground to make room for open green space on the surface.
- Antwerp's Zuidpark, designed by Tractebel's Bart Van Gassen, replaced a free car park with an 800-metre green corridor of 500 new trees that opened in 2024; University of Antwerp research shows significantly lower temperatures inside the park than elsewhere in the city.
- Zuidpark incorporates "rain gardens" — lowered spaces filled with old bluestone blocks excavated during construction and wetland vegetation — engineered to absorb extreme precipitation.
- A 2,000-space paid car park was built underneath Zuidpark's northern and southern wings, a compromise Van Gassen conceded "maybe" should have been sited further outside the city but was necessary to make the park financially viable.
- Banchini said politicians are "really scared to touch anything with cars" because they fear losing votes, with safety and municipal-traffic regulations making permanent alterations to roundabouts effectively impossible.
- The winner, from a shortlist that also includes Portugal's Leça Green Corridor and Italy's Peace Park in Vicenza, will be announced on 15 October; the prize is organized by Spain's Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona with six other European architecture institutions.
Why it matters: With European cities facing both intensifying heat and extreme rainfall, the shortlist demonstrates a clear design turn — but the Antwerp project reveals how car economics still constrain climate ambition, since Van Gassen acknowledges the 2,000-space underground parking was likely the political precondition for building the park at all. Banchini's experience in Logroño shows the flip side: even cheap, popular interventions like a week-long steam-bath roundabout cannot survive regulatory barriers.
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