FREE MÜHLGANG unburies the traces of the past to reveal through a process of erosion the stories, events, and people(s) that have been forgotten, excluded, and silenced. The history of Graz is closely tied to the Mühlgang: an artificial canal that was an essential urban infrastructure and has now become an othered space, encaged and out of reach. Our proposal liberates the Mühlgang, recovering it for the city and its citizens through an inclusive public green-blue corridor that links the existing parks—Volksgarten and Oeverseepark—with our site, turning what are now two isolated intermezzos along an otherwise inaudible, untouchable, and invisible waterway, into an immersive detour along the Mühlgang.

In view of the many voices that consider the canal obsolete and demand its draining, our approach proposes its resignification into a space for experimentation and a connecting organism between past, present, and future. Within the project site the Mühlgang is freed, overflowing a generated topography and shaping an artificial wetland: WATEREVER. Waterever revisits the thermae as a space to socialize around water, becoming a playful and exciting scenery that aims to congregate the different realities that coexist in the Gries district. The new wetland will filter the Mühlgang waters, keeping the waterway and its associated landscapes fresh and clean in order to welcome and support its own human and wild lives that will change with the seasons. The unchained Mühlgang will allow neighbors to recover the forgotten experiences that existed throughout its history, reminding people of swimming in the canal, gathering in pleasant public spaces or nurturing their own garden.

As Waterever approaches the main street—Karlauerstraße—an elevated permeable building with a green facade extends the landscape upwards: the HINGE. The Hinge creates a unique Gateway to the once iconic now outdated CityPark—the city´s first ever shopping mall—connecting it with the proposed green and blue detour along the Mühlgang. Throughout the building, an alternative program to City Park´s consumerism is displayed, enhancing environmental awareness through alternative models of consumption, gender equality, and LGBTQIA+ Identity development.

The resulting landscape, materialized through the Hinge and Waterever, becomes a statement for inclusive architectures that engage a wide range of actants to inhabit, transform and enhance a new vision for the city of Graz and its neighborhoods.

The essence of FREE MÜHLGANG lies in a social program generated by its own context. The history of Graz, through its relationship with water, reminds us that the present is an ever changing palimpsest, the result of a superimposition of multiple layers of information—some of them eroded, forgotten and invisibilized. The proposal becomes a model to visualize themes of the contemporary city that, having previously been considered peripheral, are now slowly making their way.

FREE MÜHLGANG will gradually sediment with the passage of time. Like the course of a river, different meanders will appear as the project gradually adapts to new consumer policies, to its new human and non-human inhabitants, to the new and changing urban and wild lives that it hosts, to the drift of society and to climate change. In doing so, the project seeks to continue and augment the historically participatory trajectory of Graz, giving a leading role to minority groups that may have been previously excluded.