Curatorship — UfM Student Competition on Urban Design 2025
The Union for the Mediterranean has announced the winning projects of the UfM Student Competition on Urban Design 2025: Exploring Mediterranean Urban Solutions to Climate Change and Resilience, a platform designed to promote the international recognition of young talent working on environmental and climate action through urban design.
This edition gathered 48 proposals from 13 UfM countries and 32 universities, reflecting a broad geographical and academic diversity. The jury—composed of Burak Buyukcivelek (METU, Türkiye), Laurent Hodebert (ENSA Marseille, France), Teresa Marat (ISCTE Lisboa, Portugal), Ouafa Messous (ENA Rabat, Morocco), and Dina Shehayeb (Nile University, Egypt)—highlighted the high quality, ambition and commitment demonstrated across the submissions.
Among the awarded proposals are SUNKEN (Università IUAV di Venezia), a long-term territorial strategy in Fos-sur-Mer integrating energy transition, industrial regeneration and natural systems; V-LIVE (POLIS University), which proposes the ecological restoration of the Vjosa River valley as a resilience corridor; and Metamorfosis Besòs (UPC), which reimagines the Besòs River as a metropolitan green axis, transforming infrastructure into hybrid landscapes.
Together with five additional mentions, these projects explore new relationships between nature, infrastructure and community, addressing challenges such as water management, river renaturalisation, energy landscapes and inclusive urban regeneration.
The jury particularly emphasised the participants’ ability to work across multiple and interrelated scales—landscape, urban and architectural—while demonstrating a strong awareness of environmental pressures in the Mediterranean context, including climate adaptation, heat-island mitigation and the integration of existing urban fabrics.
Through these proposals, the competition highlights the role of architecture and urbanism as key tools in advancing more sustainable, resilient and territorially connected urban models, based on flexible and open systems capable of responding to present and future challenges.
The official award ceremony will take place on 8 July 2025 at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona.
