An international Workshop held in Barcelona in April brought together participants from thirteen different European countries to see how the lessons from seven experimental settlements involving ecology and community planning could be brought from the fringe into the mainstream. The organisers of the event, the European Academy of the Urban Environment in Berlin invited Hunt Thompson Associates to facilitate and report on the process, having previously worked together on a study of the October district in Moscow and at the Community Planning Weekend at West Silvertown in London's Docklands. The experts representing the seven schemes included Lucien Kroll, masterplanner for the Ecolonia project in Holland and Barbara Able from the practice Joachim Eble, who are involved in permaculture in Germany. Other leading roles were played by Margrit and Declan Kennedy from Germany, Marilyn Mehlmann from Sweden and Robert Fowles from Cardiff School of Architecture. I always try to understand it, to translate it and to build it poetically and go deeper, more completely into that civilised landscape.
Architecture can help.