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Awards

OKRA wins Grand Award for Coastal Defence Design in China

 

OKRA has once again won an international award for its landscape and urban design project for the coastal area of Shenshan Special Cooperation Zone in Shenzhen, China. This masterplan, made in cooperation with MLA+ and Shenzhen IBR, has been awarded the Grand Award by the Greater Bay Area Urban Design Awards 2020 in the category Plan/Concept.

This award is initiated by the Hong Kong Institute of Urban Design with the support of member institutes from the Greater Bay Area Urban Designer Alliance. It is sponsored by Create Hong Kong (CreateHK) of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Our winning entry is the project Nature as Leverage to Lead Coastal Urban Development in Shenshan Special Cooperation Zone. We established a design framework for mountain, sea, and land-development that respects the Chinese historical water strategy while combining it with the modern Dutch approach. The result is a future-proof coastal defence that integrates engineering and landscape design providing a vibrant sequence of protected spaces along this beautiful 12-kilometres long coast.

Our seawater and freshwater strategies make space for buffer areas that put protection and ecology first, restoring existing ecosystems and shaping a ‘sponge’ development that boosts the quality and resiliency of nature and urban spaces: an elastic landscape!

With this project OKRA has previously won the IFLA Outstanding Award in the category ‘Analysis & Master planning’.