Q City Plan – Qinhuangdao International Student Design Competition

Q City Plan / 趣城计划 is launching a second call for proposals for an international competition based in Qinhuangdao, an important port city in the province of Hebei. The competition proposes a new approach to make public spaces more diverse and more interesting, through intervening directly in the specific built environments instead of intervening on large-scale landscape axis and nodes. The objective is to complement the insufficient design research on micro spaces in the city.

It is a global event open to students from a number of fields such as urban planning, architecture, landscape and art. This competition allows for a unique level of creativity and autonomy to the participants: project sites and scopes are their choice; they will have control over materials, construction methods and costs. A jury of acclaimed urban planners and architects will assess and judge the proposals. One or more prize-winning projects might be implemented on site (see below for prize details).

Q City Plan is an initiative of UED Magazine, which launched its first call for proposals, Beautiful Yantian, in 2016 in Shenzhen. Q City Plan aims to alter traditional urban planning approaches, which usually follows a top-down logic and is often designed from a macro-scale to a micro-scale. The competition encourages a people-oriented planning, or more humanistic approach.

Edited by: Jérémie Descamps