Audi Urban Future Award

An important aspect of the Audi Urban Future Initiative is the award established in 2010. With a prize of 100,000 Euros, it is Germany’s most highly endowed architecture competition. This year, the award is being offered for the second time and is centered on the question of how mobility can become an engine for urban development. The five participating architecture and urban planning firms are called CRIT (Mumbai), Höweler & Yoon Architecture (Boston/Washington), NODE Architecture & Urbanism (Pearl River Delta), Superpool (Istanbul) and Urban-Think Tank (São Paulo).

All of the firms are working on concepts for the metropolitan regions in which they are based. The participants met already in May in Ingolstadt for an introductory workshop, the “Metropolis & Mobility Dialogue”, where they introduced their ideas and met with Audi experts. An international jury will announce the winner in October in Istanbul. The core theses of the award are reinforced by research cooperations and workshops and discussed with Audi employees.
At the Summit, in advance of the 2011 Frankfurt Auto Show, Audi brought experts from around the world around one table. The discussions centered on breaking through conventional wisdom and hammering out sustainable ways to achieve a mobile, urban future. The topic was “Energy – which power sources will change the cities of the future?”

The current research program encompasses two projects with Columbia University in New York, planning for schemes in Chile and Columbia. The Audi Urban Future Initiative is thus building a worldwide network of experts that is developing an academic knowledge base for future mobility scenarios, at the same time building and discussing a succession of local contexts.

Status: 2012