At the award-giving ceremony for the 2018 Prize, held in the evening of 20 June, the six winning projects were announced and diplomas presented.
The ceremony, always the high point of the European Prize for Urban Public Space, brings together at the CCCB the authors and promoters of the award-winning works. Representing many different parts of Europe these works testify to the widespread recognition the Prize has achieved over its eighteen years of existence.
An abundance of solutions dealing with a wide range of problems was demonstrated in audiovisual evidence presented at the ceremony with brief films showing the six prize-winning works selected from a total of twenty-five finalists. The winner of the First Prize, a work full of symbolism, namely Renovation of Skanderbeg Square in Tirana, has been turned into an open space surrounded by a green strip with the aim of encouraging citizens to appropriate it for their own uses. Among the five Special Mentions, the low-cost project of the Poblenou “Superblock”, like the Tirana project, aims to mitigate the effects of automobiles in favour of spaces of citizen coexistence; the Cuyperspassage in Amsterdam is infrastructure planned for the exclusive use of cyclists and pedestrians; PC Caritas in the Belgian city of Melle turns a semi-ruined old building into a place halfway between an open and closed space; Zollverein Park in Essen testifies to the old German mining industry in a place where nature and industrial archaeology come together in a large-scale public facility; and the Stage in Dnipro shows the power of citizens who work together to produce spaces for public use by means of self-financing and self-construction.
The ceremony was closed by Olga Tarrasó, president of the Jury for the 2018 Prize, who offered a more detailed description of the twenty-five finalists. Finally, in his speech, Gerardo Pisarello, First Deputy Mayor of the Barcelona City Council, highlighted the outstanding role of the CCCB, and hence of Barcelona, in promoting critical reflection on public space in European cities.
