CO-SHAPE – CO-Shaping Areas in Peri-urban Environments

This project aims to integrate energy production with nature conservation and recreation in collaboration between Aarhus Municipality and the Aarhus School of Architecture.

The future challenges within climate, energy, and land use are complex. Increasing demands for land use from various sectors – renewable energy, mobility, urbanization, water management, nature conservation, biodiversity, agricultural conversion, natural areas, and recreational areas – increase the pressure on overall land use. With the growing pressure on land use and the need to produce renewable energy locally, CO-SHAPE explores various scenarios to integrate energy production with nature conservation, recreation, urban quality, etc. Aarhus Municipality and the Aarhus School of Architecture have entered into a research partnership. The goal is to develop Energy Park Spørring and explore the possibilities of using architectural planning for a holistic management of the many land use requirements in the future. The partnership runs from May 2024 for two years. The project is funded through the EU project NetZeroCities and the Pilot Cities program.

There is a need to break with our traditional thinking patterns. We must move away from the sharp divides and focus on the rational demands and segmentation of agricultural production, and the focus on technical and quantitative values if the future landscape is to meet the demands for protected nature, higher biodiversity, renewable energy, recreational activities, and generally landscapes and nature in a healthy ecological balance. The project works on the premise that more holistic planning is needed. We must think further ahead than we are used to, and we must transcend the scales we normally work with in physical planning to implement an architectural perspective in land management. We need to span a wide range of scales, from the local community’s perceived and interpreted value of the site-specific to the large landscape ecological scale. Therefore, we will continuously expand and explore architectural planning as a more analytical tool to gain a deeper understanding of the existing landscape’s history and present, and how it can be strengthened for the future to ensure a more cohesive interaction between people and their surroundings.

The goal is to create a comprehensive plan for the open land. Exactly how we will develop the plan is still uncertain. Time will reveal the best approach. But by exploring architectural planning as a deep analytical tool, we hope to contribute to new perspectives and definitions of the existing landscape, and how it can be transformed into an integrated landscape with space for production, recreational activities, and habitats for a rich variety of flora and fauna. We seek new perspectives and understandings through extended involvement processes.

We involve the local community, landowners, energy stakeholders, and municipal sectors throughout the project to gather requirements and wishes. Additionally, we explore architectural planning as an analytical tool with a focus on understanding the functional and production requirements and the landscape, as well as a deeper understanding of cultural-historical values, natural processes, landscape ecological understandings, the experienced and the sensed, changes, and continuity. We do this through co-creation processes with the local community, energy developers, authorities, and architects in planning, as well as through the development of different scenarios. In CO-SHAPE, we seek to develop architectural planning as a tool and analytical instrument for the future management and transformation of land and landscape, as well as an expansion of definitions and understanding frameworks for how we will understand and approach the landscape in an urban and landscape ecological perspective in the future.