The participants in the “Imagine green urban futures” competition, which was looking for technology-savvy planners and designers, have now been selected: the teams of lala.ruhr and the Places _ VR Festival are pleased to welcome the agency pimento formate, the landscape architecture firm GREENBOX and the scenographer Anja Cambria Oellermann to Gelsenkirchen-Ückendorf.

The jury, consisting of Sebastian Schlecht (lala.ruhr), Daniela Berglehn (EON.Stiftung) and Thomas Dietrich (Chairman of bdla NRW), decided in its digital session on the three applicants from a large number of submissions, each of whom brought exciting and different approaches to the task of developing a green and sustainable vision for Bochumer Straße based on 3D data.

The Berlin agency pimento formate, with its team led by managing director Elle Langer, wants to focus on edutainment for sustainability and playfully inspire people to articulate their ideas for green house facades, locations for urban gardening and the like and to record them with the help of self-shot augmented reality stories (AR).

The team from the Cologne office Greenbox Landschaftsarchitekten, led by Felix Brennecke, applied with the idea of thinking urban planning vertically with the help of an AR application and thus using the street or urban space on several levels.

Anja Cambria Oellermann, a scenographer from Hamburg, wants to use AR to promote the discovery of the environment, for example by showing changes in the city’s nature when it rains.

The three selected participants now have one month to realise their respective visions in 3D before cityscaper, the project’s technology partner, converts the data into AR applications. Visitors to the Places Places _ VR Festival (17 & 18.09.2021 in Gelsenkirchen-Ückendorf) can then explore the results via smartphone or tablet.

The project “Imagine green urban futures” is funded by the E.ON Foundation. Together, we want to test the concrete use of augmented reality in urban planning in order to give new impulses for participation and citizen involvement – so that the city of the future can be experienced and the debate about it becomes lively.