COZINESS VALLEY

2020

Rusia

Having high-quality public spaces in arctic cities is challenging due to harsh weather conditions. This is Murmansk’s case, where the lack of urban parks, collective spaces, and recreational areas makes public life difficult for the citizens. Furthermore, the local environment has witnessed unsustainable resource extraction that drastically affects natural elements such as water bodies and green masses. Today, the city of Murmansk needs to turn the situation around with a new way to propose places that address not only enjoyment activities but local biocomplexity needs. In this way, offering an open public park becomes the most suitable project to foster new relationships between residents of Murmansk and its context as a way toward new sustainability. Park-Lab is a proposal to enable the experiencing of public space as an exploratory lab capable of building relationships between people and the environment by using the water and its states to conform places to inhabit. Said synergies are the first step towards sustainability, portrayed through landscape architecture interventions throughout the park. Those interventions are connected by a perimeter ring, a meandering circuit, and an elevated ring. All three aim to visualize all the encounters triggered at Coziness Valley Park. The landscape interventions are small-scale structures, spaces where people can connect to, interact with, and feel nature through sensory experiences with rainwater collected from the artifacts’ roofs. Regarding the current needs of the local people, the artifacts offer not only a regular walking, jogging, and resting program but also a transversal program focused on communal events throughout the year, for instance, a place to observe the northern lights surrounded by a waterfall artifact, a dance performance in a steam artifact, or a soil seed-bank artifact for school activities. Finally, the adaptability of Park-Lab to topography makes the project part of a replicable public park system for those looking for a suitable business model to offer not only service or product but an experience for everyone. Imagine Murmansk, the unique arctic city that offers high-quality public space that responds to biocomplexity interactions between humans and non-humans.

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