The Relational Field - Mainz - "Hechtsheimer Höhe" International restrained competition of Planning and landscape design - Special Mention

“Relational Field” is about conceiving a sustainable grammar to organize the alliance between city and countryside. The project area is a land reserve, set between an unfinished urban sector of the ‘80s and a former Mine which is planned to become a vast metropolitan Parc. The «Inhabited Fields» project is conceived as a model quartier, focused on the idea of local landscape and territorial geography as social interfaces. The project structures a progressive land metamorphosis which positively contributes to the living quality of the nearby urban fabric, reconnecting the unfinished part of the city with the grand landscape of the former mine. This territorial transformation is founded on a relational strategy, which uses landscape to organize urban evolution through time. The project relies on a series of structural choices : - The access path to the area is set on a specific topographic level allowing to gain a view on both the country and the city valley. The site entrance is the entrance into the visual geography of the context. - The project’s structuring green lines connect existing local open-spaces with wider landscape systems. In this way the project helps giving a new coherence and perspective to the landscape patchwork of the nearby quartier. The project area is “cultivated” following west to east green plowed lines. In key points these lines acquire major functions in terms of public space qualification, program, or soft mobility usage. - The smooth topography is tossed in order to bring the green density and the pedestrian axis of the nearby quartiers towards new major views on the urban valley. - The western front, confronting with existing low density housing, is low density, discrete and champetre. The north-western area, will be occupied at first and planted with fruit trees and orti as extension of single family gardens areas. The eastern front, facing the mine, will be the urban façade of one of the cities’ green lungs. This area will be occupied with built units in phase 3 and associated with a higher density, coherently with the panorama it will be facing and with its plot value potential. This area is planted since from phase 1 in order to prepare a powerfull relation between built towers and landscape. - The central green space gives the existing urban axis and squares to a new horizon. It is a simple and frugal park around which major social functions are organized.