The Delta Alliance Young Professionals Awarding ceremony at the Rio plus 20 honored TU Delft Landscape Architecture alumni Federico ‘Freddy’ Curiel on a global podium.
Tonight, On Thursday, 21st of June in Rio, the Awarding ceremony of the Delta Alliance Young Professionals Award took place in the UNEP pavilion at the Rio plus 20 Conference of Sustainable Development. The Delta Alliance in the organization of the award and the awarding ceremony.
Joop Atsma, State Secretary of the Dutch Ministry for Infrastructure and Environment, and Tineke Huizinga (Chair of the International Governing Board of Delta Alliance and Chair of the International Jury of the Delta Alliance Young Professional Award) together handed the award to the three winning teams of the award:
Richard Fisher and Ryan Whipple (University of California at Berkeley, CA, USA)
Federico Curiel (DGJ Architects & Landscapes, Hong Kong)
Sander van Rooij (Grontmij), Emil Kuijs (Waterarchitect Rotterdam), Bert van Bueren (IMARES)
During the event, the award winners personally presented their innovative solutions for the Pearl Delta (Republic of China), the Rhine-Meuse Delta (The Netherlands) and the Sacramento – San Joaquin Delta (California-USA).
The winning teams will receive financial and organizational support to further elaborate their proposal in collaboration with the Dutch Wing, together with one of the eleven international Wings of the Delta Alliance.
The project presents a multi-layered strategy for a sustainable management of the Pearl River Delta (PRD). Re-Generation Delta proposes a large scale micro-algae harvesting system, converting the farmland located by the coastline of the PRD into large scale open air harvesting-ponds. The newly established infrastructure will be realized to function as a physical barrier preventing eventual water flooding.
After analyzing the political conditions, global and local issues, and foreseeing future needs and potentials of the metropolitan area of the PRD, the paper will explain how a single landscape strategy could be a solution to several global matters, exploiting the artificiality of the existing rural landscape and the specific conditions and needs of the different metropolitan clusters of the region.
All the energy is produced by micro-algae harvested on a large regional scale, processing into bio-fuel the CO2 captured and collected from local polluting sources, releasing oxygen to the atmosphere and providing biological resources to different activities and spheres of production.
This project is an application of Algae harvesting as part of a development strategy for the Hong Kong – China border region in the densely populated and heavily industrialized Pearl River Delta in Southern China.
The plan was a further development of his project for Polder Schieveen project in the Villa Urbana course set up Saskia de Wit and tutored by Fabiana Toni and Daniel Jauslin. On this Polder Inversion plan he also graduated at Prof. Remo Dorigati’s at Poli Milano with co-superisors D. Jauslin and S. Nijhuis form TU Delft.
Since September 2011 Federico Curiel is a creative director of DGJ Architects & Landscapes Ltd. Hong Kong responsible for their Asian projects and in a joint venture with ArchitecturePlus and EDFA Landscape Architects Shenzhen http://www.dgj.hk
At the Rio+20 Conference, world leaders, along with thousands of participants from governments, the private sector, NGOs and other groups, will come together to shape how we can reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection on an ever more crowded planet to get to the future we want 20 years after the 1992 Earth Summit United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio. Since then “Rio” as a political event stands for one of the main commitments to sustainable development ever. http://www.uncsd2012.org/
Download and further References see
Curiél, Federico. (June 2012). (re)Generation Delta – Landscape strategy for a sustainably managed Pearl River Delta in: DKrueger, I., Miguel Ayala L., Driel, W.F. van, 2012: Delta Alliance Young Professionals Award, Innovative solutions for delta challenges worldwide. Delta Alliance Report number 3.
Delta Alliance International, Wageningen-Delft, The Netherlands.
available at http://www.delta-alliance.org/ypa
