Project implementation: Austria
Project development: Austria

"The atmosphere of Freie Mitte, with its extraordinary relationships between people, animals, and plants, resembled what happens in a forest, where respect and freedom are in a delicate balance, and where people greet each other as they pass by, even if they don't know them."

2012-2025
Over the past 20 years, the process of natural succession has gradually transformed the 30 hectares of vacant land of the former Nordbahnhof freight station into a seductive post-industrial landscape, an urban wilderness with fascinating flora and fauna, right in the city center. Over time, people have fallen in love with this fantastic "otherness," appropriating it as their unofficial public space—a wonderful gap in the city.

In 2012, the city launched an international competition to fill this gap with half a million square meters of new buildings, primarily housing. Our winning proposal "discovers" Freie Mitte, pushing all built mass to the area's perimeter, protecting the wilderness, allowing it to continue to grow, and revitalizing what already exists: a challenging public habitat with ample opportunities for people, animals, and plants.

In the years following the competition, Freie Mitte served as a projective public space for intermediate uses, a raw testing ground for new forms of public culture. The "Nordbahnhalle," a former industrial warehouse, became a sociocultural center hosting local and international exhibitions, workshops, workplaces, and diverse programs for residents and visitors. In parallel, a large team of developers, city officials, architects, landscape architects, and ecologists worked on the design of the buildings surrounding Freie Mitte and in Freie Mitte itself.

In 2021, city politicians ceremonially inaugurated the first part of Freie Mitte. After 20 years of experimenting with existing resources, Freie Mitte allows for the surprising return of public space as a genuine promise, as originally envisioned by the neighborhood's pioneers. For the first time in Vienna, a space like Freie Mitte—with its transhuman ecology, its wild appearance, and its provocative scale—is recognized as an acceptable, even desirable, urban public space.

Ahead of its time, the original idea for Freie Mitte proved to meet the requirements of climate-resilient urban design, promoting the right to otherness in the city. The harsh realities of our time transform Freie Mitte's otherness into a potential value, a possible response to a profound crisis. The fact that striving for a more humble way of interacting with nature—even on a much larger scale—is still an exception demonstrates the need for ambitious and visionary projects that pave the way for the development of our future neighborhoods and urban environments.

Urban Development Plan »Free Middle, Vielseitiger Rand«
Urban Planning: StudioVlayStreeruwitz, Vienna
Landscape Architecture: Agence Ter, Paris/Karlsruhe
Traffic Planning: Traffix, Vienna
Client: City of Vienna, ÖBB-Immobilien (Real Estate Agency of the Austrian Railways)

Landscape Design/Implementation of Freie Mitte
Agence Ter in partnership with Land in Sicht

Research Projects »Mischung: Possible!« and »Mischung: Nordbahnhof«
Funded by Klima+Energiefonds Österreich, in cooperation with TU Wien, Institut für Wohnbau (Christian Peer, Peter Fattinger) / Institut für Soziologie (Silvia Forlati), DI Andrea Mann, StudioVlayStreeruwitz, Architekturzentrum Wien, morgenjungs, Erste gemeinnützige Wohnungsgesellschaft

Photograph of Freie Mitte
Davide Curatola Soprana

Magic Drawings
Marta de las Heras Martinez

Magazine Graphic Design
Beton.studio

Thanks to everyone who provided us with valuable information, sources and material, especially: Thomas Proksch, land in sicht, Agence Ter, Peter Rippl, Martin Riesing, Mara Reinsberger, Mirjam Mieschendahl, Angelika Fitz / AzW, Alexandra Madreiter / MA 21, IG Lebenswerter Nordbahnhof, GB*Stadtteilmanagment Nordbahnhof, Nordbahnhofviertel Service, Team Nordbahnhalle and all the people who are part of Freie Mitte.

Project implementation: Paraguay
Project development: Paraguay

“Being original consists of returning to the origin.” Antonio Gaudí
Technical Memory – Descriptive
The section in question represents a unique case in the city of Asunción, due to the intersection generated between two situations that currently favor the democratic appropriation of public space:

High pedestrian flow – There is a large number of people on foot, as the block is home to shops and services that remain open for most of the day, every day.
Presence of cycle path – Located on one of the main roads of the AMA (Metropolitan Area of Asunción) cycle path network.
Based on this condition, criteria are established for the design of public spaces in this part of the city, aiming to serve as a reference for similar cases. These criteria encompass road, environmental, and infrastructure concepts, to improve public spaces for the benefit of all users.
Considering that the street in question has municipal approval for use “exclusively for pedestrian and cyclist traffic” (Res. 948/2023), the objective is to serve the following functions:

Integrate the cycle path into the pedestrian space.
Mitigate the presence of rainwater.
Improve environmental quality with vegetation.
Ensure universal accessibility.
Ensure access to emergency vehicles.
To achieve these objectives, the elements that make up the public space are described: single platform, cycle path section/speed reducer and urban green infrastructure system.

Single Platform
The main objective is to return public space to people, prioritizing pedestrians so they can exercise their rights in a dignified, inclusive, and safe manner.

A single, continuous, integrated level of sidewalk and roadway is defined, unifying the corners with ramps with a minimum slope of 20%. This surface allows the passage of emergency vehicles, as there are no fixed obstacles to impede it.

The street, which normally dedicates 65% of its width to vehicle traffic and only 35% to pedestrians, is now almost entirely dedicated to human use, incorporating:

Podotactile surface (guides and alerts) and accessibility ramps.
Informative and precautionary signs on street corners.
Linear grates for rainwater drainage, replacing gutters.
Spaces for use by gas station attendants.
Draining gardens for vegetation and rainwater control.
Tree cradles.
Children's playgrounds.
Banks.
Trash cans.
Bicycle parking.
Water station.
Public lighting.
12% is reserved for the cycle path route, the implementation of which is justified below.
Cycle path speed reducer
Due to the high traffic volume and the “square” or “urban garden” nature of the block, cyclists must reduce their speed from around 20 km/h to a maximum of 10 km/h, and may dismount when necessary.

In this section of Alberto de Souza Street, the bike path switches sides: from Cruz del Chaco Street to the West, it's on the North side; from Defensores del Chaco Street onwards, it's on the South side. To reduce speed and smooth the transition, a winding route is proposed, with pre-signaling, encouraging cyclists to pedal cautiously and masking the change of sides.

This sinuosity breaks the directionality and transforms the place into a “natural passage”, where haste gives way to rest, without impeding the crossing.

Urban Green Infrastructure – SUDS ASU1
(Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems)
In addition to returning space to pedestrians, as proposed by the "single platform," the goal is to restore the land's capacity for harmony with people. Strategies include:

Reduction of ambient temperature by reducing the number of asphalted or cemented surfaces and increasing green or less reflective areas.
Highly permeable surfaces, allowing water infiltration and vegetation development.
Installation of draining gardens distributed throughout the block, each measuring approximately 10 m², by removing the asphalt and excavating 1.50 m, filled with stone material for controlled infiltration, protected by a drainage blanket and crimped walls (infiltration well type).

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

Formed in 2008, the Fresta Group is comprised of four architects and a sociologist [Anita Freire, Carolina Sacconi, Luan Carone, Otávio Sasseron, and Tais Freire], working on architectural and sociocultural projects. The final product is architecture, and for this to materialize, there is always interdisciplinary research and engagement through participatory processes with the local community for which the project will be intended. Just like in the projects developed for the communities of Heliópolis (SP), Rio Pequeno (SP), the Guarani and Tupi peoples of the Tenondé Porã Indigenous Land (SP), the Tupiniquim Guarani Indigenous Land (ES), the fishing communities of the Canavieiras RESEX (BA), Novo Airão (AM) or Marujá, Ilha do Cardoso (SP), the Fresta Group seeks a new perspective on the existing, seeks to channel the potential of its context to then materialize in architecture that initial raw material: the identity of its place and its inhabitants, and thus reveal and formalize its culture in buildings.

The projects in the Tupiniquim Guarani Indigenous Land, in the municipality of Aracruz, in the north of the state of Espírito Santo, were developed based on technical consultancy work and architectural projects, drawn up within the scope of a Basic Environmental Plan.
Through participatory processes conducted in seven Indigenous villages—three of the Tupiniquim and four of the Guarani Mbya—programs for developing architectural projects were agreed upon. The goal was to better understand the architecture and culture of each community, seeking to gain a field-based understanding of their housing styles, uses, needs, and overall social and environmental context.

Thus, through participatory workshops, four projects were developed for the Guarani people: housing in the Piraqueaçu village, a community kitchen in the Olho D'Água village, a community center in the Três Palmeiras village, a natural pharmacy in the Boa Esperança village, and four projects for the Tupiniquim people: an industrial kitchen in the Areal village, an industrial kitchen in the Irajá village, and finally, a women's house and an agricultural shed in the Pau Brasil village. It is important to emphasize that in these projects, the materials, uses, needs, and eventually the forms and spatial distributions were discussed and decided by the Indigenous people themselves.

The goal of the projects was to design buildings that met the proposed uses and respected the culture of each community. The use of traditional techniques and materials, as well as low construction and maintenance costs, were also a constant concern throughout the development of the projects. All buildings adopted sustainable construction systems with low environmental impact and were based on the premise of using ecological sewage treatment systems (banana circles for graywater and evapotranspiration basins for blackwater).

Project implementation: Brazil, Bolivia
Project development: Brazil, Bolivia

Forest Gens is a critical cartography project that reveals the extent of anthropogenic transformations in the Amazon. Using advanced mapping techniques in the Amazonian context, the project reveals the multiple layers that make up the region. From the footprint of current societies to territorial manipulations dating back centuries, the mapping presents the Amazon as a complex, human-shaped landscape, not as a homogeneous, untouched forest.

The work portrays the Amazon territory at multiple scales, highlighting how the interaction between geography and human interventions—past and present—allows for the development of hypotheses about the region's occupation. A focus on recent data obtained through remote sensing images in the Cotoca region of Bolivia reveals archaeological remains of ancient forms of low-density tropical urbanism. Similarly, a system of interconnected sites of indigenous black earth—organic residues of human occupation used to estimate the size and duration of ancient settlements—suggests prolonged manipulation of the Amazon environment by human societies.

Taken together, these visualizations contribute to raising awareness of the traces our ways of relating to this landscape have left throughout history, profoundly altering the boundaries between nature and society in this environment. The work is expected to contribute to the growing debate on how our societies can reinvent the relationship between urbanization and nature conservation, and imagine radically new—and less anthropocentric—futures for the Amazon.

Authorship
Concept: POLES | Political Ecology of Space
Collaboration: AO | Architects Office
Team:
Gabriel Kozlowski (Director)
Miguel Darcy
Carol Passos
Thiago Engers
Chiara Scotoni
Archaeological Research in Bolivia (Direction):
Heiko Prümers
Carla Jaimes Betancourt