Human Cities / website_Presentation of the standards for the future development of the Grand Creative park of the City of Kragujevac, as part of the Human Cities/ European initiative

Posted in 100 Creative Playgrounds, BDW Recommends, Human Cities

Belgrade Design Week and the City of Kragujevac are inviting you to the presentation of the standards for the future development of the Grand Creative park of the City of Kragujevac, as part of the Human Cities/ European initiative.

Jovan Jelovac, Belgrade Design Week founder, and prof. Aleksandru Vuja, from architecture DVA Studio, will present the “Grand Creative Park of the City of Kragujevac” project and answer the participant’s questions. The presentation will be held on Monday, 23^rd May 2016, from 5PM to 7PM, in the Faculty of the Engineering Sciences – object A, side entrance from Dr. Elizabete Ros Street.

The Grand Park was traditionally a favorite promenade for all generations in the City of Kragujevac, where the dense canopy of century-old trees, walkways, benches and sports grounds represented a valuable place for relaxation and recreation. Unfortunately, in recent decades, the park has shared an inevitable fate of the general deterioration of its city. As an ecosystem, the Grand City Park is a rare urban tissue of park greenery maintained over one hundred and fifty years. The benefits of this heritage, the potential social interactions, the microclimate and emotional aspects that it generates all contribute to the general perception of this type of architecture as a focus point, around which we can gather our attention, assess our will for a better tomorrow and present it as our contribution to the urban community gathered around the pan-European Human Cities / project.

The aim of the project is to further develop the citizen’s beloved park by means of participatory urbanism and cooperation with some of Serbian and world’s best practices in the field of innovation and design. This is just the first step of defining a new framework of citizen’s participation about the park’s future design, with the primarily intention to provoke and activate a responsible involvement of all stakeholders into a joint search for standards of a possible development scheme for Kragujevac’s green zones. These standards define not only the principles of how to preserve and develop the park in a certain timeframe, but also new standards of how to initiate and decide matters regarding this and other valuable parts of the urban tissue.

A further objective of the project is to open up the dialogue with the citizens and inspire them to review, in a wider context, the existing urban, green and historical premises of Kragujevac, stretching from the Grand Park to Šumarice, and to try to integrate them into one uninterrupted entity, designed as a unique model of relaxation and contemplation, while at the same time creating a new cultural and historical destination for high quality tourism in Serbia’s heartland. This innovative complex would link the latest achievements of domestic and international creativity with existing rich heritage sites of the city of Kragujevac, which already include the best works of giants of creative thinking such as Vojin Bakić and Ivan Antić.

In April 2016, the Foundation and BDW triggered the realization of an idea concept of the future Grand Park, entitled “Creative”, as the first vision for discussion. The development of the preliminary design concept, as first inspirational stage of the revitalization of the park, based on BDW’s results of the EXPERIMENTATION phase, was entrusted to the team from Studio DVA, headed by architect and professor from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade Aleksandru Vuja, and his students, several of which are from Kragujevac.

Presentations and workshops in Kragujevac in May 2016, in which the concept of the new park will be presented to local citizens and the City, will mark this part of the EXPERIMENTATION phase. Another high point will mark the execution of the first part of the project – playgrounds for children, young people and seniors, as a possible sustainable beginning of the construction of a new park, as inspirational call to donors to support all the other sections of the park itself and the wider monumental/heritage park sites in Kragujevac, while citizens open the public discussion with the City and media which next functions and contents for the Grand park may be developed.

Therefore we are inviting you to join us, as a citizen, professional, neighbor, partner, project supporter or the opponent, and to share your opinion and ideas with us.