Register: June 2010 / Submit: (to be confirmed)
Registration fee: none
ARC will engage the best and most innovative international, interdisciplinary design teams—comprised of landscape architects, architects, engineers, ecologists, and other experts—to create the next generation of wildlife crossing structures for North America’s roadways.
This competition seeks specifically from its entries, innovation in feasible, buildable context-sensitive and compelling design solutions for safe, efficient, cost-effective, and ecologically responsive wildlife crossings. In doing so, it hopes to raise international awareness of a need to better reconcile the construction and maintenance of road networks with wildlife movement.
An emerging critical priority for both transportation and natural resource agencies is to make North American highways safer for both drivers and wildlife. The fact that wildlife-vehicle collisions have doubled in the past fifteen years has concentrated transportation agencies’ attention on engineering solutions that prevent wildlife-vehicle collisions on the continent’s roadways. At the same time, roads have been acknowledged as a major obstacle to landscape connectivity and ecological vitality—a matter of growing concern as climate change, in the form of rising temperatures and hydrological shifts, portends increasing wildlife migrations. In this context, the continents’ road systems pose a significant threat to the long-term health and viability of North American wildlife populations. The four inter-related objectives for this competition are to:
- Provide an avenue for international teams of design professionals to address new design challenges in the coalescent issues of road transportation safety, structural engineering, wildlife conservation and landscape ecology;
- Explore creative new approaches, materials, and designs that address the fundamentals of transportation engineering and ecology;
- Increase the number of potential solutions for cost efficient, innovative crossing designs that can be adapted for widespread use in other locations; and,
- Engage design professionals and students in the interdisciplinary nature of road ecology with a real-time, in-situ application.