River Somes: across communities and ecosystems
How will we live together?
La Biennale di Venezia 2021, 17th International Architecture Exhibition
The River Somes project is a contemporary example of river regeneration and re-naturalization efforts that aims to interconnect the diverse communities that inhabit the city of Cluj-Napoca in Romania, as well as to re-associate them to local fauna and flora species that were far removed from their natural habitat on the riverbanks.
Given the wide range of the project, it proposes a new frame for dialogue and interaction by means of architecture and unites the efforts of a wide multidisciplinary team that includes architects, landscape designers, engineers, urban planners, government agencies, and everyday users in order to find a possible answer to the question of how we will live together.
The project, therefore, re-imagines the river as a new active social space for interrelation that operates across scales and programs. It defines how the residents of the city interact among themselves and with their surrounding ecosystem. On a community-scale level, it becomes a space to gather and exchange ideas among the different communities that live in the city.
The Somes project, although limited in time and space, has multiple ramifications that affect entire communities across social orders and physical boundaries, and acts as a new piece of shared infrastructure that addresses both local and global conditions equally.
