The LE:NOTRE Student Competition 2025 with the title

'Northern Budapest and the Danube Bend - Imagining alternative futures for Budapest’s northern periphery'

was part of the 14th Landscape Forum of the LE:NOTRE Institute in June 2025 and was hosted by MATE, the Hungarian University for Agriculture and Life Sciences, in Budapest, Hungary.

The competition featured a typical peri-urban landscape that is coping, on the one hand, with the impacts of continuous urban sprawl and suburbanization. On the other hand, this landscape is part of the Danube River corridor. The Danube has been a transnational cultural and natural connector for millennia, leaving multiple layers of identity and particular spatial imprints on the landscape.  The overall goal of the Landscape Forum, and also of the Student Competition, was to generate fresh perspectives and innovative ideas for alternative futures for this periphery.

Malavika Mohan Das and Ruba Khaled Al-Hamzi, two IMLA students, worked on this assignment as part of their Master's Thesis.

They were supervised by Prof. Ingrid Schegk and Prof. Tilman Latz and won the third prize with their joint contribution 'Bridging Landscapes'.

The award ceremony took place during the LE:NOTRE Landscape Forum on 17 June 2025 in Budapest.

A detailed presentation of all prize winning teams' contributions of the competition can be found here (PDF 237 mb).