Student Competition 2024-2025

International Student Competition 2024-2025

Northern Budapest and the Danube Bend

From placelessness to a radical HERE

Imagining alternative futures for Budapest’s northern periphery

River prospect of Vác, photo by courtesy of Istvan Csuhai, creative commons

Competition working period: 15.09.2024 – 31.01.2025

How to participate

This competition will focus on the northern periphery of Budapest. We suggest a transect along the Danube starting at the northern edge of Budapests’ municipal boundary, crossing various peripheral municipalities, passing the iconic Danube Bend and finally leading to Eztergom at the border to Slovakia.

Within this scope we suggest three competition focus areas. Each team can select one of them and base their work on that specific landscape context.

Competition Aims

This competition features a typical peri-urban landscape that is coping, on the one hand, with the impacts of continuous urban sprawl and suburbanization. On the other hand, this landscape is part of the Danube River corridor. For millennia, the Danube has been a transnational cultural and natural connector leaving multiple layers of identity and very specific spatial imprints on the landscape. 

The overall goal of the landscape forum, and also of this competition, is to generate fresh perspectives and innovative ideas of how we might imagine alternative futures for this periphery by activating and generating its actual landscape capacity.

Transect approach and focus areas

While we expect all teams to consider the river corridor, its past, present and future, as the overall context of analysis, reflection and landscape visioning, the core work of the team proposals will be in one of the three focus areas.

Competition teams can choose one of these three areas:

  1. The southern settlement edge of Szentendre
  2. The inner periphery of Vác
  3. The natural and recreational landscape east of Esztergóm

Overview of the competition area

Competition scope and location of the three detailing areas in the northern functional urban area of Budapest and the Danube Bend, map source: ESRI topographical map retrieved via arcgis.com

Past competition winning teams and results