EL CABAÑAL, A SUSTAINABLE NEIGHBORHOOD FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Every generation builds its own city in terms of the social, economic, technological and cultural conditions of its time. We have the opportunity to put forward a new model of urban development that responds to the new conditions of habitability for the start of the 21st century. The fact is that we no longer live in a compact metropolis, but in a discontinuous metapolis, an extensive territory criss-crossed by road and rail transport routes and occupied by kernels of population, logistics centers, industry parks and shopping and leisure centers around which people (local, national and foreign) move according to their needs. In this situation it is as necessary to propose strategies for the renewal and compaction of the urban centers as for the integration and protection of the elements that constitute the natural and geographical landscape of our environment. The challenge of constructing a new neighborhood on the boundary between the city of Valencia, in Spain, and it’s orchard (the famous ‘Huerta’) will enable to explore this open and dynamic new hybrid condition of the territory and to propose a new model for the construction of the urban fringes. I would like to address the challenge of integrating the landscape that surrounds the city of Valencia, the landscape we have inherited from our ancestors. To do this it is necessary to reformulate the very concepts of urbanism with which traditionally is operated in the city. The word 'urbanism' was coined by Ildefons Cerdà to designate the science of urban growth, a process based on the implanting of a rational grid, superposed on an agricultural layout, in which the owners of a plot of agricultural x land had transferred to them the ownership of a plot of urban land eligible for development. It is this principle that has informed and overseen the urban expansions of the 19th century and the modern city of the 20th, the typically North American low-density city and the historical revivalism of the end of the last century. But the challenge facing urbanism now is to manage to make the city grow, integrating into our developments the anthropological and cultural elements of the landscape that surrounds us - constructing and conserving are accomplished in the same act. As against the old city-country dichotomy I now propose to bring about an intelligent transition between these two formerly antagonistic modes of dwelling, an integration that lets us recognize the social and cultural value of -in this case- the landscape of the Huerta of Valencia and incorporate it into the urban fabric by means of appropriate management strategies. Given an increasingly uniform global society, we need to recognize the specific cultural and landscape values of each territory as fundamental to the quality of life of the people who live there and to reaffirm a distinct identity that can provide a competitive advantage. Because of this, in contrast to the town planning of the 20th century, conceived on the basis of the speed of the car, I would like to propose a new model of 'urban-agricultural' development that guarantees the creation of a high-quality local environment. More than designing a city, I would like to create habitable environments that effectively resolve the different factors that give people the assurance habitability at different scales: the neighborhood, the landscape and the home.M.S. in Architecture, July 201