Hélène Chartier, C40 Cities Senior Advisor and project manager for the global Reinventing Cities competition, will discuss the goals and format of the innovatively structured competition, which is open to architects and bid teams worldwide. The deadline for first-round submissions from interested teams is May 31, 2018. She will be joined by Ilias Papageorgiou, partner of SO-IL, who will talk about SO-IL’s Place Mazas project in Paris, a winner in the Reinventing Paris competition that provided inspiration for the current competition.

Reinventing Cities is a project of C40 Cities, the global organization of mayors working to combat climate change. Sixteen cities around the world have identified publicly-owned sites in their cities (45 in all), and the competition seeks proposals from multi-disciplinary design, development and operational teams with ideas for how to acquire and use the sites to meet local needs while building a carbon-free future. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo developed the concept of the competition in the two rounds of Reinventing Paris, a process her administration created to imagine new uses for city-owned properties. In announcing the global Reinventing Cities competition, Hidalgo said:

“As the Chair of C40 I am launching a new global competition called Reinventing Cities, to stimulate zero carbon development across the world’s cities and celebrate innovative solutions to environmental and urban challenges. Reinventing Cities will set new standards of carbon-neutral and resilient development and enable the implementation of projects across a wide range of architecture, typology and site-usage.”

The 16 cities participating in the Reinventing Cities competition are Auckland, Cape Town, Chicago, Houston, Madrid, Mexico City, Milan, Montréal, Oslo, Paris, Portland, Reykjavik, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, San Francisco and Vancouver.

Learn more about the C40 Reinventing Cities competition.