The Jury of the Streetlife Design Competition, organized by Landezine in partnership with Streetlife, the Dutch urban furnicher designers, selected ten finalists. The winners will be announced at the award ceremony on March 28, which will take place in Leiden, Netherlands, where the finalists will present their work. The works of students and young professionals presented below were selected among 86 entries, submitting their projects on reimagining ‘Lost Sites’.

Here are the Finalists:

Unveiling the Layers of Place is a project in Spain that uses ruins as creative input, reimagining them as a site for exploration and play. From military grounds to spontaneous collective use by informal nomadic settlers and more-than-human users, the project connects past and present uses in a system of programmatic nodes, moving rubble to shape a landscape that uncovers and highlights historical layers.

The Learning Curve is a project in Stockholm, Sweden, that 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.

SPURS – From Lost Tracks to Vibrant Lives is a project in Los Angeles, California, that repurposes abandoned rail tracks—typically urban tissue separators—as connectors. While rail lines historically spurred development, they now also symbolize industrial decline and impoverished communities. By mapping the social structure and abandoned spurs and tracks, the project presents a strategy for their transformation and selects a focal site for design intervention.

Re-Envisioning Lives is a project in New York that responds to the city’s plan to build “jailscrapers” in Chinatown. Addressing residents’ opposition, the project envisions a jail-integrated landscape—an urban jail model that respects both the imprisoned and the surrounding community. By dispersing jail facilities and rethinking the jail unit as a social catalyst where “all lives matter,” the project scales down its footprint to create a more humane and rehabilitative environment.

From Ruins to Roots is a project in Kharkiv, Ukraine—a city on the war frontline. It focuses on rebuilding torn social connections and alleviating stress by revitalizing lost public spaces. With a pilot project in the Saltivka neighborhood, the initiative addresses immediate needs for shelter and care, considers post-war rehabilitation and recovery, while also preparing the community for possible future conflict.

The Sensory Spine is a project in Glasgow, United Kingdom, that reimagines an abandoned piece of infrastructure traversing the Botanic Gardens as a community space. The disused rails and train station are transformed into integrated sites for history, culture, education, play, and exploration, creating a new piece of infrastructure.

Emergency Landscapes is a project in the Attica region of Greece, addressing recurring wildfires that hinder ecosystem recovery. The project chooses a site at the boundary between flammable forest and urban structures. The model the project creates incorporates a newly designed public space as an evacuation site, as well as a prevention line of a resistant buffer with bioswales and other measures integrating with the social space program.

Flowing Forward is a project in Richmond, Canada, that seeks to reclaim the Fraser River’s lost edges, fragmented by industrialization, extraction, and urbanization. Through a series of interventions along the river and by reshaping an island now overlaid with concrete, the project works to restore the river’s natural flow.

West Broad School is a project in Georgia, USA, that reclaims children’s autonomy in play by developing a board game. This interactive approach explores how to return and rearrange lost elements while layering new uses. Existing site conditions are shuffled with cards for now lacking Food, Shade, Sound, and other factors, that inform the design and get embedded in the landscape.

Remnants is a project on the Greenwich Peninsula in London, United Kingdom, that develops sites along a strip of land sandwiched between old industrial uses, new developments, and the Thames. Using found objects and site-specific cues, the project proposes transforming the area into a reclamation factory—a center for recycling, phytoremediation, and community structuring.

We congratulate all the Finalists who put effort into locating and creatively reenvisioning the sites and looking forward to seeing their presentations.