DIALOG is sponsoring the 2014 Symbiotic Cities International Design Ideas Competition entitled “Urban Transformations: Designing the Symbiotic City.” Open to planners, urban designers, architects, landscape architects, engineers and ecologists, the competition challenges participants to transform existing cities into more resilient, climate adaptive, regenerative, symbiotic cities.

“Over the next 25 years, cities and the ecosystems they are an integral part of, face enormous challenges,” says DIALOG principal Craig Applegath. “The combined and interacting forces of climate change, fossil fuel depletion, deforestation, collapsing fisheries, and exponential human population growth will create unprecedented challenges for humanity, and our planet. The Symbiotic Cities International Design Ideas Competition is intended to generate critical thinking and discussion around these critical issues.”

Using some combination of diagrams, sketches, 2D and 3D drawings, and accompanied by an explanatory narrative, participants are asked to explore and develop planning and design concepts for transforming the city that they live in into a regenerative symbiotic city adapted to a climate-changing environment. Design concepts should explore key environmental problems associated to the city and transform ecologically destructive urban systems into regenerative symbiotic systems.