Uncertain City

4 mn read

In terms of adaptable city, the concept of an uncertain city focuses on creating open spaces to allow anticipate and increase resiliency when an unprecedented event occurs. It is necessary to interpret the existing urban scheme from a different perspective while looking its past and present. Then it must be reimagined, redesigned and reused for its future.

When it comes to madrid, while looking at its past, it derived its name from the arabic “mayrit” which means a place where water is rich. Although water created the city, heavy infrastructural interventions and dense urbanization in madrid turns the city into an overcontrolled system of water that is not responsive to the changes in climate.

Climate change predictions continuous increase in the number of heavy storm events per year

Climate change predictions continuous increase in the number of heavy storm events per year, which may also cause severe flooding events in Madrid. Although heavier storms are being registered in Madrid, overall, the city is starting to experience a significant reduction in average cumulative annual rainfall and also lack of permeable surfaces leads to a decrease in runoff into rivers. When it looks at the history of the water infrastructure in Madrid, it began with an incipient network of underground pipes and wells that have grown in the 16th century with the increase in population and used until the construction of canal de Isabel.

Today, however, despite the proliferation of these pipes, the water flow did not provide much more than for human consumption. Based on all these results, it can be seen that; “water is everywhere before it is somewhere. It is in rain before it is in rivers, it soaks before it flows, it spreads before it gathers, it blurs before it clarifies. These are waters at moments in the hydrological cycle that are not easy to picture in maps or contain within lines. It is ephemeral, transient, uncertain, interstitial, chaotic, omnipresent.” Just should not consider water as an instant situation. It existed before us, must exist after us.

Is this time of reimagining, reproducing, and reusing the relationship with water?
Is this time of questioning whether water is everywhere, not somewhere while looking past, present, and future?
Is this time of adapting a city to water? Is this time recalling Madrid’s water?
And is it a time of releasing of water in gran via and its constellation?

The oasis promotes interaction between the immediate and the urban environment and shows how co-creation will become the framework for active urban and everyday life while dealing with global climate issues by using rainwater solutions. By combining cycle thinking which has the strength to adapt to external influences and create properly functioning ecosystems with the oasis, creates a cycle system based on main tools that help increase the synergy between water, biology and the people. The area will be climate-secured with long-lasting solutions with defining buffer zones to provide functional and architectural by taking advantage of the water flow phases.

Ecological Strategies

City nature will handle and retain rainwater but will also increase the quality of water while considering the biological and social environment around it. The overall form is an elaboration of conditions established locally while can also allow change which feeds the environment while contrasting it with its surroundings. The oasis act as a machine to be a solution for madrid’s drought problem by making the water reusable. Meanwhile, it becomes a subject for researching environmental conditions of water for users. It both combines technology and uses water not only in the cycle but also as a research material. The city also enables social activity with a digital experience. This involves the entire process of the design’s hydrological, biological and social cycle phases that allows more participation.