Water, Topography and dispersion

Located in the south of Ecuador, Cuenca is a city of 500.000 inhabitants, of which 330.000 live in the urban area, while the rest, in the rural parishes that surround it. Cuenca enjoys from a beautiful setting: a valley enclosed by mountains and crossed by four rivers, a landscape which tightly has weaved in the image and character of the territory and its inhabitants. The studio explores how the city works as a complementary system of places, from the attention to the territory, in order to abolish the artificial limits between city and its parishes. Understanding the dialogue between the urban evolution of Cuenca, the surrounding productive landscape, the mountainous landscape and the waterscape is a point of departure. On the one hand the city grows along the rivers micro-valleys, incorporating the surrounding parishes, which are characterized by their dispersed evolution. The mountainous, water and productive landscapes lay in-between. In every parish this in-between landscape is being consumed in different ways. San Joaquin, at the edge of the city, faces an enormous demographic pressure. San Joaquin is a fertile, flat land bounded by rivers, and ideal for agriculture. Sinincay is an extreme productive landscape of pasture, agriculture and brick manufacture. However the current production is gradually exhausting its natural resources. Exemplary for this process are the brick factories that exhaust the clay soil leaving derelict wasted landscapes. While the landscape in Chiquintad, a commuter town in the mountains, is structured by its domestic agriculture of low production, with some problematics on water management. How to rethink and revalue these relations between landscape and urbanisation? The current territory is characterised by diverse dialogues between city and land, by the complementarities of places, by exchange between the different urban and social contexts and by different modes of urbanity. Yet the territory evolves towards a homogeneous approach of these diverse and complementary relations, consolidating a centrality focused on conventional urban models of dense structures. The network of markets is one of the components that escape this process. The markets are places of exchange of goods, culture, social groups; places where the city and the parishes are confronted. How can this network of markets and the market itself play a role in the evolution of the urban fabric and the changing social structures? Addressing these design challenges the students read and change the territory on different levels in order to value and strengthen the current structures of ambivalence, complementarities and diversity.status: publishe