Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU) Faculty of Architecture Dean Prof. Dr. Özgür Dinçyürek and Vice Dean Assoc. Prof. Dr. S. Müjdem Vural represented EMU at ‘The Building 4 Humanity’ contest, under the scope of the 8th International Building Resilience Conference, held in Portugal’s capital Lisbon.
The contest aimed to significantly decrease the natural disaster risks and losses for people and businesses; also for the economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental existence of societies and countries; along with the risks and losses that may pose threats for their well-being and subsistence. The theme of the contest was determined by considering the aforementioned topics.
The said contest was held in three different categories, namely projects developed by students, projects developed and to be realized by design professionals and projects developed by design professionals but will not be put into practice. The top three projects received awards and all short-listed projects were given the opportunity to be included in an exhibition or to be published.
Some scenarios like fire, flood, tsunami, earthquake, drought, whirlwind, areas with a landslide tendency, refugee camp and urban areas housing refugees were proposed for the participants’ projects. Each team worked on a different scenario from a different part of the world and created their own programmes. They focused on creating a better form of recycling that will either include a flexible design that takes place at any stage of the disaster risk management cycle, or creating a design to surpass its predecessor.
The contest received a total of 60 applications from around the world and the evaluations were done by expert academicians and pragmatists of urban planning, landscape design, disaster risk management, humanitarian architecture and shanty settlements. During the first stage of evaluation, each project was evaluated by at least 5 experts and 29 projects were chosen in 3 different categories.
During the final stage of the competition held in Lisbon, the final evaluations were performed and the winners were announced. The details of this contest in which Prof. Dr. Özgür Dinçyürek and Assoc. Prof. Dr. S. Müjdem Vural served as jury members are available at http://2018.buildresilience.org/
