Students make Jeseník a green Silicon Valley and a sustainability leader

Disappearing we will turn a border town with outdated infrastructure into a green high-tech leader. This ambitious goal was set by Brno architecture students. Their project shows how the former district town of Jeseník can become a city of the future by 2025: an ecologically innovative center inspiring municipalities that face the same environmental challenges. The public can view the result as part of the Enlightenment festival.

Twenty BUT architecture students in Brno, under the leadership of Jan Mléčka, joined forces with the office of Jeseník city architect Tomáš Pejpek and together worked out a strategy for the future development of the city. The goal is to create a green Silicon Valley, a leader in research and development of green technologies, and to connect a modern city, interwoven with intelligent sensors, with a natural landscape full of water and life.

"Ruthless numbers and graphs show a sharp decline in the population in Jeseník, the city's structure is fragmented and uneven, unemployment is high, and the costs of maintaining quality infrastructure are still rising. According to the tables, Jeseník should save itself with a lot of cumbersome measures for astronomical amounts. However, if we abandon the theory of infinite growth and instead apply the principle of the so-called shrinking city, Jeseník has enormous potential," explains project leader Jan Mléčka.

Key motifs of the Jeseník 2025 project:

A city as a landscape

Jeseník is unique in the way the surrounding landscape grows through the city to the center. By controlled merging with the landscape, the ideal of an urban nature park in the spirit of the so-called "Urban Wilderness" (Urban Wilderness), which developed cities strive for (Südgelände or Gleisdreieck parks in Berlin, park on Vrch St. Kříže in Prague 3) can be achieved with minimal costs.

City as a variety bank

In the new park across the entire city, native species of trees, shrubs and plants or crops can be supported. The entire system would become a diverse gene pool of resistant varieties that gave way to mass agricultural production or invasive introduced species.

City as a source of energy

The new urban landscape is an important source of renewable energy. By connecting with university research on so-called vortex turbines, a large amount of electrical energy can be obtained even within an ordinary stream without the need for significant interventions in the bed. Similarly, small wind turbines can be used and unique sites in one of the windiest cities in the Czech Republic can be used.

The city as technological inspiration

Jeseník can offer the best possible conditions for research and development of green technologies. The newly created intelligent landscape is permeated with thousands of simple sensors. They communicate with each other based on the principles of IoT (Internet of Things) and provide a huge amount of attractive tradable data about the functioning of the urban landscape as an interconnected whole.

The exhibition called Jeseník 2025 will open on Saturday 18 September at 19:30 in the foyer of the city cinema. A guided walk through the individual locations with commentary by the authors will take place on Saturday 2 October 2021 at 10:00 a.m. (starting at the fountain on the square) as part of the Jesenice Days of Architecture.