The Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to announce that the 14th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design has been awarded to the Grand Paris Express, a large-scale transit project currently being built in and around the Paris metropolitan area. Through carefully articulated design interventions, the Grand Paris Express illustrates the potential for the planning and execution of mobility infrastructure to transform a city and its region. Société du Grand Paris, a national agency responsible for designing, creating, and implementing the Grand Paris Express, will receive the $50,000 USD prize and recognition for the continued stewardship behind the project.
With 68 new stations and 200 kilometers of additional tracks, as well as extensions of existing metro lines, the Grand Paris Express is currently the largest urban design project in Europe. Its four new lines will circle around the capital and provide connections with Paris’s three airports, developing neighborhoods, business districts, and research clusters. It will service more than 100 municipalities, 165,000 companies, and the daily transport of 2,000,000 commuters. Construction work began mid-June 2016 and is due to last until 2030.
Grand Paris Express: Reconfiguring the City through Radical Infrastructure, an exhibition coinciding with the prize, will be on display at the Druker Design Gallery from January 23 – March 31. Curated by Joan Busquets, Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design, the exhibition showcases models, renderings, documentary photographs, and video footage of this vast and ambitious urban design project. A public lecture and reception for the exhibition is scheduled for Thursday, March 2 at 6:30 pm at Piper Auditorium. For more information, visit https://urbandesignprize.gsd.harvard.edu/grand-paris-express/
