Landscaping and urbanization work
In 2005, the Madrid City Council of the Popular Party called an international competition of ideas with the aim of recovering the banks of the Manzanares as it passes through Madrid. The project must connect the districts and neighborhoods of the city separated by the highway, with other endowment infrastructures such as the Green Cycling Ring, Matadero Madrid, the Casa de Campo, the Fruit Market, as well as existing heritage and cultural elements next to the river such as the hermitage of the Virgen del Puerto "Ermita de la Virgen del Puerto (Madrid)"), the Toledo bridge and the Segovia bridge. It would also be assessed whether the project contemplates the connection with the sections of the river that link the city with the territory outside the city.
The winning project of the competition, directed by architect Ginés Garrido, was prepared by an interdisciplinary team that included the studios Burgos & Garrido Arquitectos, Porras & La Casta, Rubio & Álvarez-Sala, and the Dutch landscapers West 8, all united under the motto M-Río. The proposal stood out for its ecological values by recovering the forests near the city, creating a continuous system of green areas structured by the river, linking the center of Madrid with the Casa de Campo.
This creates a park consisting of a pedestrian and recreational area built between 2006 and 2012 on the banks of the Manzanares River, largely on the underground route of the M-30 ring road, from the South junction to the junction with the A-5.[2].
The banks of the river are recovered and regenerated along its entire length, as true areas of integration between the landscape and human activity, under a contemporary understanding capable of overcoming the antagonism implicit in the urban-rural binomial.[8] In this way, Madrid recovers its river for its citizens, since it was hijacked by the M-30.
At a metropolitan scale, through the project and its conception as a large infrastructure, the incorporation of the corridor that extends over the river banks as it passes through the city is carried out as part of the GR-124 of the European Trails Network from Manzanares el Real to Aranjuez.
On an urban scale, the project incorporates the river as a double line of the unprecedented façade and configures a linked set of green spaces that infiltrates the city. It establishes on the surface a new system of mobility and accessibility. Increases the integration and urban quality of the neighborhoods bordering the river. It protects and revalues the historical heritage and creates an area of new centrality, which generates an overall change in the city.
On a local scale, the proposal is executed as a radically artificial operation, materialized however with eminently natural instruments. It should not be forgotten that most of the work is carried out on underground infrastructure. The project is implemented on a tunnel or, rather, on the roof of a very complex set of facilities serving the buried road. A concrete building more than six kilometers long, with enormous and decisive easements and with a topography whose logic obeys exclusively to the construction of the infrastructure, which emerges unexpectedly above the ground and with which it has been necessary to negotiate. Regarding this underground building, the solution adopted has been based on the use of vegetation as the main construction material. The project establishes as a general strategy the idea of implanting a dense vegetation layer, almost forest in nature, wherever possible, that is, manufacturing a landscape with living matter, on an inert underground substrate, modified and excavated for the automobile, on a construction that itself expresses the maximum artifice.[9].
The families, forms and associations of selected plant species come from the extrapolation of the study of the river basin and its adaptation, in each case, to the specific urban environment. The organization of the different environments and their characterization as places of public use has been produced taking into account, on the one hand, the required functions and needs detected in each district and, on the other, the ability to form habitable spaces, inherent to organized groups of vegetation of different sizes.
The solution is specified in three main landscape units:[10].
• - The Hall of Pines, or green corridor that runs along the right bank of the river. It is the structure that allows the continuity of the routes and reacts when they meet the existing bridges, giving rise to different types of riverside gardens (lower gardens of the Segovia bridge, gardens of the San Isidro bridge, gardens of the Toledo bridge and gardens of the Prague bridge).
• - The definitive link of the historic center (represented by the imposing image of the Royal Palace and the elevated cornice of the city), with the Casa de Campo, a park of more than one thousand seven hundred hectares. This environment includes Avenida de Portugal, the Huerta de la Partida, the Explanada del Rey and the Virgen del Puerto gardens.
• - The wide strip on the left bank where the Arganzuela park complex is located, which includes the Matadero contemporary art creation center, and which represents the largest area of unitary green space in the proposal.
In addition to these three large, coherent landscape operations, the project proposes one hundred and fifty interventions of different nature, among which the bridge system stands out, which provides an unprecedented degree of permeability to the channel. Solutions have been developed for more than twenty bridges or walkways over the river, rehabilitating the seven dams, recycling some existing bridges and creating new passages, sometimes with silent language and other times, intentionally expressive. As in a microsurgical action, the project incorporates, link by link, a chain of formulas for integrating the river into the city and the city into the river. They are elements that guarantee the contagion of the new values of the regenerated shores to the nearby areas and neighborhoods. With this resonance effect, a succession of operations is planned to ensure a far-reaching renewal. From now on and irreversibly, a radical metamorphosis is being forged, unprecedented for the city of Madrid.[7].