          JOHANNESBURG INNER CITY PARK The Park builds upon existing energy, connecting heritage, cultural and sports nodes with natural features to provide a generous and beautiful large-scale public landscape for a broad constituency of public users. It would become a place to recreate, socialize and safely move between areas. As such, the park would be fundamental to assuring the competitive attractiveness of Johannesburg’s Inner City and become a leading-edge model for the design and sustainable management of an inner city park system for South African cities. Modern large-scale urban parks are increasingly integral to the sustainable development of cities. They should differ from the large public parks of the past, which were likewise set up from strategic points of view, like Central Park in New York, in that they were regarded as catalysts of urban development, or were there to counter the social ills of the city. Today’s parks, which might rather be called landscapes, are set in urban areas, where they represent ‘nature’ and have to serve a wide range of purposes. These parks are fundamental to assuring the competitive attractiveness of cities – that is, as contemporary open space. The CBD of Johannesburg has little open space and is a densely packed conglomeration of buildings, roads, infrastructure and vehicles. THE SEAM advocates a purposeful discourse between human activities, city landscape and ecological systems ultimately manifesting in the deliberate celebration of the urban of the urban void. The celebration glorifies the interstitial (the space between ...), so that the void is invariably romanticised and becomes the ‘seam’ that stitches together disparate elements of the city ... Creating a desirable environment that allows for the free movement of pedestrians and cyclists through the city and is the catalyst for the regeneration of derelict areas. THE SEAM employs an approach that entails defining void at the CBD scale and proposes that once the voids have been identified they can be reclaimed, remediated and creatively stitched back into the dense urban fabric to be utilised by the citizens of the city as places to recreate, socialize and safely move between districts. The design team for the first round of the competition was: NLA, Greeninc and MRA. |