Competition North Park Pulheim - Regionale 2010 Preparation and monitoring of a limited open competition

The town of Pulheim, located to the west of Cologne, has developed into an up-and-coming medium-sized centre in recent decades. At the same time, the planning and realisation of public green spaces could not keep pace with the building activity. Today, there is an almost complete lack of larger, landscaped green spaces suitable for recreation and leisure use. In light of demographic change, this is a deficiency that must be addressed.
With the Regionale 2010, the opportunity is now arising to create green spaces with recreational facilities. The feasibility has been proven in preparatory studies. The city council has decided on the path to implementation via a competition.
As a result, the competition - building on the ideas of a preliminary study by WGF Landschaft in the context of the project deepening of 'RegioGrün' - is to further concretise the vision of 'Nordpark Pulheim' between Venloer Straße and the Kölner Randkanal and to develop detailed plans for the first construction phase on the north-western edge of the city.
In this context, "park" is not, in the conventional sense, a 100-hectare area overgrown with lawns, flowers and trees, but a new form of landscape in the sense of a compatible interpenetration of agricultural uses with space-creating and structuring vegetation structures and activity zones for leisure, sport and play.
Existing and planned structures complement each other to form a new form of cultural landscape at the seam between the city and the countryside; they are flexible and open to use.
In 2010, the presentation year of the Regionale, the first building blocks have been implemented; Pulheim presents these approaches to a new park concept.
Participants were expected to submit proposals which, in the sense of an ideas section, on the one hand develop a green planning vision for the entire planning area, and on the other hand propose initial measures in the realisation section for the presentation year 2010, knowing the planning constraints and making full use of and optimally distributing the available funds. These measures must concentrate on the available areas. However, this also includes networking with the settlement, the qualification of paths and the first building blocks of a "green skin" on the north-western edge of Pulheim.
The size of the total area, including existing sports areas, roads, paths and equestrian facilities, is 100 hectares, which means that the park will be realised in several construction phases over a longer period of time.

We were commissioned by the city of Pulheim to prepare and accompany the competition. The choice fell on a limited, single-stage procedure according to the applicable competition guidelines. In addition to 7 seeded offices, composed of 5 experienced and 2 young teams, landscape architects from the EEA states and the member states of the WTO Services Agreement could apply to participate. The field of participants was limited to 24, with 70 applications requiring a notary-supervised lottery.

Following this selection, the competition started on 05.06.2008 with the dispatch of the documents.
At a colloquium on 18.06.2008, the objectives of the competition and queries were discussed in dialogue between participants and the jury.
The plans were to be submitted by 14.09.2008. In addition to an overall view of the North Park Pulheim, a presentation of the measures of a first construction phase in the western part of the park was required. Furthermore, explanatory sketches and details were requested on a third sheet. Written explanations and a cost estimate completed the service package.

22 of the 24 potential participants submitted a work.

In a full-day meeting chaired by Prof. Gerd Aufmkolk, all works were first presented by the preliminary examination.
After a discussion of the criteria on which the evaluation of the works was to be based, the evaluation rounds of the jury began.
The aim of these rounds is to determine a so-called "shortlist" of outstanding solution approaches.
These 6 remaining works, which were considered to be the best solutions after 3 evaluation rounds, were finally analysed in detail by the jury and discussed intensively about the appropriate model for the North Park - both in terms of its role in the context of the Regionale 2010 and with regard to the long-term perspective.

The jury unanimously recommended to the awarding authority that the work awarded first place be chosen as the basis for further work.

The winner of the competition was the Berlin office bbzl böhm benfer zahiri landschaftsarchitekten.
The project has since been realized and is well received and appreciated by the population.

In 2014, the project was awarded the NRW.landschaftsarchitekturpreis of the bdla nw.

What makes a good competition?
1.
A broad field of participants; the combination of seeded participants and a "low-threshold" application procedure (without elaborate application documents) with a drawing of lots has proven to be an optimal compromise. The competition is, of course, anonymous.

2.
An invitation to tender that clearly indicates what objectives are being pursued. Divergent interests are discussed in advance and brought to coincidence, the participants need a resilient framework for their creativity.
Not to be forgotten is the assumption of all troublesome preparatory work by the support office: CAD data merge, georeferencing, testing sheet sections.

3.
A preliminary examination, which is able to present the silent on paper drawn and described thoughts of the authors value-free, but committed and competent. With a car the contact surface to the road is only 4x a hand width, with an anonymous competition the preliminary examination is the bearer of the "message".
In contrast, one can rather save long tables and calculation models.