A ‘’Playground of Cultures’’ on the banks of the Amstel river.

Concept

Team: Matteo Renna, Alberto Doncato

The east bank of the Amstel river is a residential neighbourhood of Amsterdam.
Its promenade is a popular area where locals, expats and tourists enjoy the river. Even if the area is usually busy, there is almost nothing facilitating interaction between groups. The crowd looks fragmented in its cultural and age diversity.

Our feeling is that we could enrich the riverside and the neighbourhood with a platform of aggregation and cultural integration.
Understanding and empathize with each other is key for tolerance and driver for a peaceful world. In recent years, intolerance in Europe is widely perceived as being on the rise: increased support for extremist or populist political parties, and intolerant attitudes in the behaviour of individuals.
We feel that cities need to be fortresses for cultural integration.

In particular, when Covid19 will be under control, there will be a need for people to empathize and reconnect physically in meaningful shared places.
Try to imagine: connect land with water, and connect people from various cultures with one single, strong gesture.
A platform that, like a paper sheet, gently lays on the edge of the river uniting everything and everybody.

The path through the platform imitates the river, symbol of connection, allowing walkers to access and cross it. Small and simple installations trigger the passers-by to connect human diversities and equalities, with the power of community, while enhancing different senses: look, play, share, feel.

Innovative and sustainable materialization
According to the municipality of Amsterdam, 3.500 kg of waste is removed from the city’s waterways every day; for the most part, plastic.

Several Dutch startups are developing projects to recycle this enormous quantity of plastic waste.

For the materialization of this concept, we would propose a collaboration with one of these companies Our goal is to utilize a single material with a high sustainability factor for the whole design; thanks to the mechanical characteristic of the sheets it is possible to create every part of the platform: pillars, beams and surface panels shaped according to the design.

The connection between the elements is made possible with steel elements interlocking pillars, beams and
surface panels.  The platform floats thanks thousands of recycled plastic bottles kept together by a net.