Amnesty city-countryside through the “riverscape”: Towards a more sustainable relationship between the urban Granada and its own landscape

Abstract

The new urban configurations contain an interesting mixture of land uses more or less active. They draw open pieces on a map where the natural geography and agricultural spaces are trapped. They are forms belonging to a time when the relationship city-countryside was clearer, and the coexistence between urban and agricultural functions easier. Nowadays, the agricultural tissue in the urban periphery is a common feature of the European cities (mainly in Mediterranean cities) and, in the case of Granada, the way as the city has been growing may be considered against the geographic and agricultural view of the territory. In this context, rivers are the natural link between urban and rural areas and their 'riverscape' become a field of possibilities for the implementation of new territorial functions. The revitalization of the Genil River along its more urban length must be based on the new territorial dynamics in response to the current social, cultural and economic demands.

The research studies the urban possibilities of this "natural corridor" and tries to demonstrate that in functional, spatial, and social terms, it has many more possibilities of intervention than the fact of being considered as a resulting product of non-rational processes of accumulation of borders, protections, etc. These new 'riverscapes' would lead to a programmatic and typological search in order to incorporate innovative facilities and new collective architectures.

As a result, it is possible to balance two fundamental tensions of the future project: responsibility for the history and inherited geography, and the sense for the occasion and the invention of a landscape deeply related, a way to create an interesting place to allow the temporary coexistence and the development of a more integrated territory.