On 27 May, the final event of the student design workshops accompanying the activities of the Gdańsk City Architect’s Office as part of MOBILITIES FOR EU took place.

Students of spatial management, architecture, economics and transport of Tri-City universities, gathered in interdisciplinary teams, were looking for an answer to the question of how to improve the urban space of the emerging and rapidly changing Nowa Oliwa in three key, intertwining aspects: transport, environment and quality of life. The composition of the teams was selected by lot, and the substantive supervision of the developed concepts was provided by a group of mentors: scientists, local government officials and practitioners of infrastructure design and management.

The idea of entrusting field and social research, as well as the analysis of existing strategic and planning documents to students, and then preparing their own project visions on their basis was born almost a year earlier, during the constitution of the working team supporting Gdańsk’s participation in the international network. Academics, who interact with young people on a daily basis, rightly assumed that they would approach the subject with their characteristic freshness, independence and critical view of the existing reality. Many of them know the space of Nowa Oliwa first-hand. Many of them study on the Oliwa campus or live in the surrounding housing estates and intensively use the infrastructure and means of transport connecting individual faculties, libraries and cultural centers on a daily basis. On the other hand, students who are not connected with Oliwa and Przymorze on a daily basis brought a perspective to the projects that allowed them to see details that others simply missed.

Work on the concepts of Nowa Oliwa culminated in the finale, in which representatives of four interdisciplinary teams presented the effects of their several months of analyses. Although the projects themselves – drawn in detail on the following pages – defend themselves in terms of content, the final speeches showed that the students also mastered the art of presentation to perfection, sometimes rubbing shoulders with the qualities typical of an artistic performance.

Watch the full video about the workshop below: