LGS Balingen 2023

The aim of the competition was to improve not only the green spaces, but also Balingen’s overall urban spatial structure in order to strengthen living, working and retailing in the city proper and to promote relationships with suburbs by way of an attractive city centre and connective accessibility. A continuous system of riverside promenades spans the river Eyach on both banks while connecting the diverse subspaces to form a linear riverside park in a north-south orientation. As a counterpart to the urban sequence of squares through the city’s historic centre, the Eyach – with its adjacent green corridors – creates an amphibious and soft counterworld to Balingen’s built urban structure. Green interfaces dovetail the various subspaces and divide the course of the river into sequences of decreasing intensity to create a scenic progression from the city proper to the open countryside. The individual waterways are differentiated in character – the Eyach becomes a landscaped watercourse with an overriding networking function, the Steinach a built-up urban waterway in a historically rich environment. With its realisation of the horticultural show, the city of Balingen will have the opportunity to unify all the individual urban development measures and concatenate them in a single continuous riverside park.