Birsfelden represents a large neighborhood built at the end of the 50s and during the 60s along the river Rhine and located on the western part of Basel adjacent to the location of the Kraftwerk Birsfelden power plant. Built on an area of 252ha (204 of which settlement area), it has today approximately 10.000 inhabitants. Like many modern development that have been built all over Europe in the same stretch of years, Birsfelden suffers from the shortcomings that many of these neighborhoods share: isolation, a generally uncritical application of the tenets of the modern movement in terms of relationship with the site and its landscape, a predominant mono-functionality (residential) and poor spatial qualities of the open space surrounding otherwise scattered towers and slabs.
From an energy point of view, buildings from this period perform rather poorly and a general reduction of the overall energy consumption in relation to building envelopes should (and in many cases is) generally been pursued. Yet, despite possible amelioration of the building envelopes, the analysis of a similar neighborhood built in the same years in Basel (De Bary, 1959 – see Studio Basel, Energy. Investigating the Metabolism of Cities, 2012) has revealed that this urban typology has a large potential for its transformation towards a more compact, diversified and dense neighborhood and therefore contributing to the definition of an urban form that would be able to limit energy consumption. Despite buildings height is generally rather high, the density of inhabitants in this parts of the city is not extreme compare to other urban typologies. Tackiling also a rather limited building footprint, different scenarios for the use of what today seems a largely unused land can be proposed. Also, their locations although originally peripheral has in many cases become much more attracting compare to other outer districts of recent construction.
Following the general premises for the transformation of the city described above, interventions should aim at increasing the density of inhabitants and at offering new living and working spaces that would make this part of the city desirable for a more diversified range of social groups. Interventions should take advantage of the potentials of the site, namely the presence of a large and unused horizontal surface that today lacks any programmatic and architectural definition, both by increasing the use at the ground level and by reducing its spatial monotony.
More specifically, interventions should focus on the entire strip of land that stretches along the Marie Lotz Promenade and between the Birskopf and the Sternenfeldstrasse. In this strip of land future interventions should tackle what seems till now a missing opportunity, namely the presence of the Rhine river and the lack of meaningful relationship between the existing housing development on the back and the river shore.
Interventions in this portion of riverbank should be on the one hand answer to the general question of what the river front in a peripheral area could be and on the other indicate solutions that would improve the living qualities in the existing housing development on the back. Projects should follow different and alternative strategies building up a possible set of architectural proposals that would at the end offer a set of alternatives proposals: from the expansion and completion of existing building to the definition of a new settlement on the river shore, from the definition of the edge to the transformation of the ground floor.