Marius Găman and Ana-Maria Branea work under the :STUDIO name as a research and experimentation laboratory focusing on understanding and exploring urban patterns and parameters, transformations and planning practices, architecture and design. :STUDIO is dedicated to creating sustainable interventions and projects, developed mainly for competitions or academic research. These investigations and experiments have been published, awarded, and exhibited nationally and internationally. Anamaria Bujancă, Romina Popescu Alexandru Mihăilescu joined the team after their graduation. All five share similar approaches and values regarding urban planning, while also bringing to the table individual skill sets from different domains (e.g. architecture, urban design, management).

What makes an active centre? How can sustainable redevelopment be kickstarted through active co-creating of the public space? How much local identity can be preserved while shifting mobility patterns, densifying the urban tissue, changing the way inhabitants interact with public space and emphasising nature? Addressing Åkrehamn’s unclear urban structure and lacking a discernible centre we proposed a cluster of independent projects stitched together through a densified urban tissue and a network of stoa and green galleries. Connecting the sea, city centre and its natural surroundings through high quality outdoor areas, the new urban structures promote walking and biking by enlivening and strengthening the connections between the harbour and the main road. Public space thus becomes the stage for complex transformation processes as well as a vital and functioning urban heart. Combining leisure, residences, businesses, retail the proposed urban infills create a new, more cohesive urban tissue, threaded together by the stoa and gallery network. The site's potential for both new construction and transformation of existing structures is thus achieved while the network of connections between them ensures the plan can be implemented at a pace set by the public private partnership. Short term improvements can be set up so that the area remains attractive during the implementation period. As the gallery network activates and transforms areas formerly dedicated to cars or suburban housing to mineral and urban squares, water bodies and ecological corridors more opportunities to expand the network arise and strengthen the overall connecting infrastructure. As Europan projects have always been a mixture of innovative responses to real problems posed by local authorities with the explicit aim of being implemented and applied research on the overarching themes proposed by the board, the Karmøy City hall is in the process of using the authors’ proposal in a tactical urbanism approach of urban acupuncture implementing, in a staged process, parts of it. The first stage consists of redesigning the public space at the intersection of the proposal’s main axes, near the public library and the former firehouse.