The finalists, special mentions, and prize winners of the Streetlife Design Competition, organized by Streetlife and Landezine, have been announced! Congratulations to all participants for their effort and for showcasing their work!

Students and young professionals from the field of landscape architecture and other professions related to the design and development of open public space were invited to participate. Registrants selected a “lost site” and developed a proposal for a redesign. Among 86 received works, the jury selected outstanding proposals. The jurors were Sylvia Karres from Karres en Brands, Giulia Frittoli from BIG Landscape, José Almiñana from Andropogon, Peter Krouwel from Streetlife and Zaš Brezar from Landezine.

The award ceremony took place in Leiden, Netherlands, on the 28th of March, with the awarded teams’ presentations. We welcome you to check out the selection below.

1st Prize Winner: Re-Envisioning Lives

Jury’s recognition:

“This provocative and ambitious project reimagines the correctional facility not as a “jailscraper” looming over Chinatown, but as an urban living room—integrated, reparative, and ecologically responsive. Through distributed, smaller-scale interventions and an emphasis on transparency, access, and biodiversity, the proposal dismantles the architecture of intimidation in favor of a typology rooted in care and coexistence. It offers controlled yet humane outdoor programs for inmates—gardens, farms, and meeting groves—while reclaiming the building’s facade as habitat for nonhuman life. At the urban scale, the project returns public space to the community, creating generous, flexible grounds for shared civic life and local expression. This is a radical inversion of carceral logic—one that proposes landscape not as boundary, but as bridge.”

Unveiling the Ruins – Reinterpreting History to Create a New Story

Jury’s recognition:

“This project reclaims a forgotten military landscape not as a static monument, but as a dynamic terrain of discovery, memory, and play. Through careful attention to buried materialities and ecological processes, the design invites users to engage with layers of contested history—reinterpreting ruins as participatory infrastructure rather than relics of decay. The proposal’s phased, community-driven strategy blurs the line between archaeology and landscape practice, transforming excavation into collective meaning-making. Its inventive reuse of rubble and remnant elements into social and biodiversity nodes reflects a rare blend of poetic sensibility and pragmatic design. By daring to ask whether a site of tragedy can become a playground, the project stages an extraordinary reconciliation between the bleak traumas and future possibilities.”

3rd Prize Winner: Remnants

Jury’s recognition:

“This project offers a raw, materially-grounded vision for reclaiming Greenwich Peninsula’s overlooked industrial shoreline, transforming scattered remnants into a vibrant culture of reuse. By centering design around found objects, gabion construction, and studios for upcycling, the proposal cultivates a community-led practice of making and learning—without erasing the site’s industrial DNA. The interplay between “granules,” “habitation,” and “bioscene” becomes a conceptual and physical framework that acknowledges coexistence, and ecological repair. Rather than sanitizing or overwriting the site, the design accepts its entanglements, inviting participation through hands-on engagement and shared stewardship. Bricktopia is less a finished place than a process—celebrating the strange, gritty in-between of urban transformation.”

Special Mention: Emergency Landscapes

by Athanasia Pappa, Katerina Davou

Recognized with a special mention by the jury, Emergency Landscapes focuses on the soft prevention tools of severe climate disasters. Situated in the Attica region of Greece, the project addresses the recurring wildfires that threaten both ecosystems and urban areas. It also points out the social discontent and land speculation as a threat.

Jury’s recognition:

“Set against the wildfire-prone terrain of Attica, this project offers a visionary model for transforming fragmented, neglected public spaces into multifunctional landscapes of resilience, safety, and community life. Grounded in fire ecology and climate-adaptive strategies, the proposal integrates fire-resistant vegetation, water barriers, bioswales, and evacuation infrastructure into a cohesive system that doubles as everyday civic space. What distinguishes the work is its scale-sensitive approach—carefully modulating design interventions from forest edges to plazas—ensuring both ecological functionality and neighborhood livability. The design does not treat emergency as an exception, but rather as a condition to design through, offering a landscape that is prepared, performative, and continuously engaged. This is a deeply relevant, future-facing proposal that redefines landscape architecture’s role in climate adaptation and public safety.”

Special Mention: SPURS – From Lost Tracks to Vibrant Lives

by Zi Ting Wang, Zi Lan Wang / Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Awarded a special mention, SPURS – From Lost Tracks to Vibrant Lives reimagines abandoned rail tracks in Los Angeles, transforming them from urban dividers into connectors.

Jury’s recognition:

“This project uncovers the buried rail infrastructure of Los Angeles’s Arts District to reframe forgotten spurs as connective tissue in a fractured urban fabric. Through a “cut-and-fill” strategy, the team transforms a neglected parking lot into a dynamic landscape of microhabitats, bioretention zones, and community-oriented reuse. What makes the proposal especially compelling is its material ethic—using salvaged asphalt, pallets, and shipping containers to anchor a site that honors every layer of its industrial, agricultural, and social past. Sensitive to the pressures of gentrification and environmental vulnerability, the design balances historical memory with participatory futures. With its low-cost, phased, and ecologically attuned vision, the project is both a reclamation of place and a blueprint for urban resilience.”

Special Mention: Flowing Forward

by Angat Desai, Tatiana

Set in Richmond, Canada, Flowing Forward seeks to reclaim the lost edges of the Fraser River, which have been fragmented by industrialization, extraction, and urbanization. Through a series of interventions along the river and the reshaping of a concrete-covered island, the project aims to restore the river’s natural flow and dignity to the river’s course.

Jury’s recognition:

“This project reclaims a flood-prone, degraded urban site as a performative landscape that gracefully bridges water management, ecological restoration, and community healing. Centered around the theme of flow—of water, memory, and resilience—the design proposes a layered intervention that both addresses climate vulnerability and nurtures human connection with the land. The proposal stands out for its elegant integration of hydrological systems with public space, turning risk into opportunity through seasonal transformation and adaptive infrastructure. By weaving together flood basins, elevated walkways, and planting strategies, the site becomes an educational and restorative commons that evolves with environmental conditions. “Flowing Forward” presents a poetic yet pragmatic vision of urban resilience, where water is not controlled, but engaged as a co-designer of place.”

Finalist: The Learning Curve

by Malin Almgren, Anna Jogefalk, Felicia Labor, Emelie Lenning

A project in Stockholm, Sweden, reconnects a lost site to its past uses while proposing new connections to the city’s green corridors, establishing a learning environment. Rather than a homogenously redeveloped site, the project examines and maps remnants of past uses to develop programs aligned with the surrounding community and school, which lack green, educational, and outdoor sports spaces.

Jury’s recognition:

“This project transforms an abandoned highway interchange in Stockholm into a rare urban landscape where education, movement, and ecological resilience intersect. Drawing on the site’s layered history— from prehistoric terrain to infrastructure relic—the design invites users to rediscover the space through physical exploration, playful learning, and seasonal transformation. The proposal is grounded in real community engagement, particularly with local schoolchildren, whose imaginative uses of the site informed a design that feels genuinely rooted in lived experience. Through sensitive reuse of found materials, preservation of ruderal vegetation, and noise-buffering topographies, the project offers an immersive pedagogical environment that resists over-programming. It’s a compelling argument for rewilding the Anthropocene, using design to reframe what urban nature can be: messy, curious, and fundamentally human.”

Finalist: West Broad School

by Katie Grace Upchurch / University of Georgia

Located in Georgia, USA, West Broad School reclaims children’s autonomy in play through an interactive board game. This approach explores how to restore and rearrange lost elements while layering new uses within the landscape.

Jury Statement:

“This project transforms the fraught history of the West Broad School site into a landscape of remembrance, agency, and resilience. By grounding its design in rigorous historical research and a spectrum of play theories, the team reframes a space of past segregation and abandonment into one of empowerment—particularly for children. The proposal stands out for its use of sensory gradients, risk-based modular play, and a careful layering of horticulture, reflection, and movement to foster autonomy and healing. Their collaboration with educators and play practitioners ensures the design is not only responsive but also experientially rich and pedagogically grounded. This is a proposal that doesn’t overwrite history—it activates it, inviting the community to reinhabit the site with presence, memory, and play.”

Finalist: The Sensory Spine

by Rashmi Pai Dongerkerry, Olga Martynenko, Aishwarya Kohli, Ezgi Aydin

Set in Glasgow, United Kingdom, The Sensory Spine transforms an abandoned piece of infrastructure cutting through the Botanic Gardens into a dynamic community space. By repurposing disused rail lines and a former train station, the project weaves together history, culture, education, play, and exploration—turning forgotten remnants into a new, integrated public realm.

Jury’s recognition:

“This proposal reclaims the disused Glasgow Botanic Gardens Railway Line by threading it with a multisensory journey that reframes neglect as opportunity. The project is structured around five sensory zones— taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight—each inviting visitors to engage with the site’s layered character in deeply embodied ways. Particularly compelling is the team’s sensitive integration of design within the site’s semi-open, tunnel, and open conditions, creating a rhythmic spatial experience that avoids spectacle while enhancing immersion. By maintaining the integrity of the existing structures and botanical context, the proposal achieves a subtle but transformative reactivation of a long-abandoned linear void. It is an elegant synthesis of heritage, accessibility, and sensory ecology, offering a restorative landscape that reconnects Glasgow’s past infrastructure with present community life.”

Finalist: From Ruins to Roots

by Jie Wen Hu, Zi Zheng Zhao / University of Pennsylvania

Located in Kharkiv, Ukraine—a city on the war frontline—From Ruins to Roots focuses on rebuilding fractured social connections and alleviating stress by revitalizing lost public spaces.

Jury’s recognition:

“This project reframes wartime public space not as a void to be mourned, but as a medium for collective resilience and long-term regeneration. Centered around Kharkiv’s metro system—repurposed as a lifeline for shelter, aid, and connection—the proposal transforms adjacent underutilized spaces into flexible, sensory-rich hubs for both survival and post-war healing. What distinguishes this entry is its seamless integration of immediate wartime functions with an adaptable post-conflict vision, balancing trauma-informed design with ecological and social recovery. From repurposing debris to seed banks and dual-purpose infrastructure, every gesture underscores the value of community agency and continuity. This is landscape as an act of solidarity—sensitive, strategic, and profoundly necessary.”