Call for entries – SHIFTboston – "WHY STOP Competition: Imagining the South Coast Rail"

Kim Poliquin, Director of SHIFTboston, would like to personally invite Quebec architects, urban designers  and urban planners to participate in the 4th edition of the SHIFTboston Ideas Competition:

“WHY STOP Competition
Imagining the South Coast Rail

Deadline: September 16, 2011

In support of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s South Coast Rail Economic Development and Land Use Corridor Plan, SHIFTboston is challenging urban planners, architects, urban designers, designers and landscape architects — professionals and students — to explore and visualize destinations along the proposed South Coast Rail extension, which will connect Boston to Taunton, New Bedford, and Fall River, Massachusetts.

The planned extension of commuter rail lines from Boston’s South Station to the Massachusetts South Coast has the capacity for broader re-conception and re-imagination of the region. We encourage competitors to investigate and to explore the potential of this new network and its RESOURCES. Competitors might animate the rail system by adding to or enhancing the latent urban NETWORK. These NEW destinations could draw from the regional and local resources, industry and culture such as, universities, agriculture, arts, marine industry, historical institutions, tourism and recreation. FUN? Consider what has not yet been considered — contemporary communal and PUBLIC meeting places, open markets for local food production, a regional cultural campus of performance space and theaters connected by rail, or new research and development campuses or dense residential districts. The submission might explore these stopping points along the rail as part of system of supporting links which make up a greater network. The competitor might also choose to focus on further developing the central core of one or more of the cities on the line, such as Fall River or New Bedford.

“We will not understand the full potential of the South Coast Rail Project until we can see it.”
Greg Guimond, Deputy Director and Comprehensive Planning Manger, SRPEDD

This international competition and event will foster the development of valuable concepts necessary for a new and vital urban network along the railway therefore becoming a true realization of the potential of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s South Coast Rail Economic Development and Land Use Corridor Plan.”

For more information…

(Source: Kim Poliquin, Founding Director, SHIFTboston)