This Master's thesis, achieved in one year with 2 colleagues, concerns the regeneration of a peripheral area of Madrid, the Ensanche of Vallecas, which we could study in situ for 6 months with the help of the University San Pablo Ceu of Madrid; we propose a method to transform the free and unbuilt areas into temporary and affordable public spaces, to give back to the suburban areas their local identity, an easier fruition and a better quality of life.
We went to Madrid to study how the Financial Crisis of 2008 affected the new areas of urbanization (PAUs) considered by the Town Plan of 1997 (PGOUM '97).
In fact, since this plan expresses Spain's economic prosperity of those times and its population growth, it stated that new peripheral areas within Madrid's borders should have been urbanized in the 2000s, and the Ensanche of Vallecas was one of those.
In the first years of 2000 many buildings started to be built in Vallecas following a grid of square lots, but after the Crisis of 2008 many subdivided areas remained empty and unused, though fenced. Because of this, Vallecas appears too fragmented, full of unusable empty spaces which confuse and disorient the pedestrian.
But Vallecas has also many other problems since its streets are oversized and represent physical barriers, there's a strong lack of shading, that makes very difficoult to walk in the summer, and the whole area it's divided in two by the Motorway M45 (by causing the isolation of the Southern part).
In our project we try to solve all these problems by reducing the size of the main streets to create linear parks and equipped axes, with many spots of relax and pastime. The new main axis will be served in future by new Cultural Poles (which we just symbolized by two famous existing buldings) .
The Motorway will be sutured in the intersection with the main axis and some projecting roofs will cast shadow over a Biological Market. Next to this there will be some urban gardens and orchards.
As for the empty square lots, we projected some temporary modular tiles of public spaces with different functions:
1- Sport fields, (football, basket, table tennis, fitness, roller skating) made of coloured concrete
2- Playground, with many circular spots of coloured rubber
3- Skatepark
4- Rest and relax areas
5- Urban Gardens
6- Shading by trees
7- Shading by projecting roofs
8- Public benches
9- Self-building
The whole Ensanche has been divided into Neighborhood Units and each of them will be supplied with all these tiles and a local square.
With this solution, we could give Vallecas a new local identity by making the residents feel the center of the project and bringing back the human scale in a desert of empty spaces. All these expedients are temporary and affordable, looking forward to better times!
