THE URBAN REHABILITATION.

INTERNATIONAL DAYS IN CUENCA

After the intervention of the head of department of Seville V. Pérez Escolano, that he revised the interventions happened during the decade of the eighties, in a global way, in different European capitals, every time that extended the frame of intervention out of the historical helmets and insisting on the pragmatism of these performances in the face of the excessive utopianism of the previous decade, he was proceeded to the exposure of more specific proposals.

Under the generic title of monumental Cities: The following plans were tackled by new forms of intervention:

1.-E. Bardají and J. L. Dalda exposed the special plan of Santiago of Compostela, a project of protection and intervention in the historical city from current budgets and without renouncing the modernity.

The city of Santiago, with his I magnify monumental monumental center -declared historical ensemble- in 1940- built to a large extent during the baroque period, needed of a special plan (PE) that contemplated: the protection of singular buildings and urban image, besides the necessary mechanisms of urban renewal.

Its authors detailed the intimate relation|relationship of the PE with the current general plan (PG), every time that there was a deepening in the will of architectonic definition. Scale 1:500. The plan was conceived on four basic aspects:

a) Maintenance of the base board of the historical city, which separates the historical city of the enlargement, situated to an inferior level.

b) Conservation of the environmental unit. Led, among other things, by the normative employment of the granite of the place.

c) Maintenance of the urban-agricultural structure of the “rueiros”. These are a sort of alleys that goes down of the historic center to the lower part of the city, formed by housings in row on former rural ways, where a conservation of the speculation is aimed maintaining their use and structures together to the one promoted of their enjoyment citizens, even with the opening of new their.

d) Protection of the Mount Pedroso, geomorphologic element cooling jig of the landscape façade of the city.

There are precise interventions of prestigious European architects, on the other hand, as the assignment of a museum to A. Siza, or an block of housings to J. P. Kleihues.

2. -Alcalá de Henares. The reconstruction of the monumental center. Carlos Clemente, director of the office of the agreement -among MOPU, the Community of Madrid and the town council- explained the basic features of the intervention.

Alcalá, situated on the corridor of the Henares, constitutes an atypical case of city, impulse given to her for the cathedral Cisneros with the foundation of the university, finds settled on terraces in swampy land.

With the decline of the university, the city becomes depopulated, being militarized in 1885, due to their strategic situation. Of such a luck that until recently it was not had even even architectonic planimetric information. In the sixties there is a strong immigration that is agreed in their periphery, taking character of city-bedroom and tertiary to the under protection of the military and prison activity.

With the recent de-affectation of the barracks and military facilities and the creation of the University Carlos III the problem of recovering the monumental city and the suture to this of the seven peripheral devices has arisen. Everything that carried out by a study of the most representative buildings with the subsequent projects of rehabilitation that contemplate also extensions of buildings because of the insertion of new uses.

The formalization of ensembles and the recovery of spaces for public use affects the bulking of blocks as well as some cases in their completely. The strategy of recovery has consisted of the allocation of a use for every building and the subsequent cession of this to an organism or entity in exchange for their rehabilitation.

On the other hand, under the title the recovery of the center as public city the following interventions were tackled:

1. -Alcoi. The program of rehabilitation. After an introduction of Fernando Ubeda, chief operating officer of Architecture and Housings of the Generalitat, in which he revised the politics of their headquarters in the last years, putting the emphasis in the collaboration of the different administrations. Like this as in the relationship between documents of planning, programs of inversion and the execution.

Passing next Gaspar Muñoz to the exposure of the program of rehabilitation of Alcoi, where he highlighted the integral character of the intervention that affects so much the historical helmet as to the periphery. Establishing nuances among areas of preferential performance and areas of urban renewal on consolidated areas. The performance in the periphery, which presents an absence and/or unbalance between equipment that it is intended to requalify, is combined with performances on areas of the historical helmet through specific projects where the function is looked for of revulsive that he regenerates wider areas. Because of that it has been ordered to architects of recognized international solvency: Siza, M. Solà Morales, F. Venice, Miller, Aymonino, Moneo,? It’s of highlighting the strategy carried out of purchase of properties and sites on the part of the town council for the posterior elaboration of special plans in these areas, very practical resource, but that due to his partial character, he sparked off a controversy as for his methodology.

2. -Cádiz. The public performances in the maritime range. José Manuel Vera, town councilor of Planning of the city, and the municipal architect Fernando Domínguez exposed the interventions in Cádiz.

Cádiz constitutes a terminal city due to its geographical situation, whose only possible growth is the conurbation with other municipalities. The city, built in the 18th centuries and XIX, where the building activity is only possible by rehabilitation or replacements.

The old town has a great populational density and constitutes the area lived by the people with less economic resources, for the most favored classes abandoned it moving out of the enclosure of the city (Port of Santa María).

The buildings of the helmet have suffered a process of subdivision and their material state is of great deterioration. The strategy of the town council has consisted of the purchasing of buildings under threat of expropriation, which was agreed on by all the groups of the town council attending to the urgency of the situation. After their purchasing the town council is in charge of the rehabilitation of the building.

There is, on the other hand, a series of urbanistic and architectonic performances along the waterfront that have effects in an optimum way in the image of the city, as maritime avenues on the beach of Victoria; treatment of the Caleta; remodelling of the Field of the South; rehabilitation of the bastion of the Candelaria, destined for maritime museum, or the precise rehabilitation, as the house of the Chains, as provincial historical file, in charge of Cruz and Ortiz.

The last day of the course "The catastrophic situations as opportunity of urban laboratories" were given under the epigraph: The fire of the Chiado in Lisbon and the earthquake of Naples". With the exposure of these two cases people proceeded to the analysis and processes of recovery of parts of the city affected by disasters. The subject of the Chiado will be developed in a posterior article.

The recovery and new architecture in the program of reconstruction of Naples: Exposure that the technical director of the commission of the special program of Naples, Roberto Gianní, developed.

The city had an approved planning in which the recovery of the historical helmet was contemplated as well as the integration of peripheral neighborhoods with a very noticeable personality that had been absorbed by the urban expansion, and that are named casali. At the two months of the approval of the PG it came about the earthquake of 1980. Paradoxically, this fact offered a dramatic opportunity of performance on the ensemble of the city.

Naples, due to its historical circumstances and to its peculiar social composition, constitutes a specific case that the difference of the rest of Italian cities: in spite of the expansion of the fifties and sixties the great problems of mistake of housing and deterioration of the existing ones provokes a massive social protest, included general strike, the that i caused a reflection and the beginning of a process in the decade of the seventies that fabricates a plan that intended to block the speculation, and that it was inefficient, with the that the social protest continues up to ends of the seventies giving rise to the plan of this study.

After the earthquake, the town council is satisfied as an emergency administrative structure of strong character and special powers. With that the philosophy of the current plan, which means a double guideline, is applied specifically: the creation of great quantity of new housings and the performance on the consolidated areas most degraded -center and casali.

This plan established a distinction among public and a qualitative jump in the life deprived of this city with imbricated average areas that they mean.

On the other hand, the performances on the casali -of Roman structure and construction of the XVIII- it is relevant, since its degradation was not only urbanistic, but also municipal building, for with the course of the time strange elements that disfigured its typology had been added. These interventions consisting of its morphological type restitution.

At present, the plan is found practical and totally executed, because it has been effective in this situation.

To conclude the course, and under the epigraph of "The urban project in the recovery of middle historic centers", the interventions in Brescia and Oviedo were tackled.

Brescia: Of the city planning to the architectonic intervention. Giorgio Lombarda, professor of the University Institute of Architecture of Venice, exposed the main characteristics of the performances in the city.

It could be taken as a paradigmatic case to apply "Old city" from Valencia, once this as autonomous unit had been understood, so much for their management as for their constancy in the time in an economic situation of the not buoyant town council.

It is an experience that starts at the beginning of the seventies, in a unitary politics of the town council trying to carry out a global management. As consultant for the architecture and the planning, the town council has had from the beginnings of the plan, with L. Benevolent.

The plan was structured by stages: In a first stage a group of technicians dependent on the town council, whose task was the elaboration of a general plan, organized himself together with some typological analyses that orientated the interventions of the individuals. As result of that, all the historic center remained under typological control.

In the historic center a mixture of two typology that is frequent in the north of Italy was observed: that of Roman square, which produces the house with courtyard (cortile), occupied by resident with more resources, and that of germanic origin, which is the house among mediators with front closer, in regime of rent, that are deteriorated much more for lack of maintenance of their inhabitants -humbler.

In 75 starts a second stage, with direct public intervention on the areas of center historical more degraded. For that they start off the transfer from people to temporary housings. They consider 50 the number of units to carry out this action with economic capacity, technique of projects and of follow-up. Finally, after the rehabilitation, the reaccommodate of their primitive inhabitants. In such a way that the town council is in charge of buying, placing, restoring and reaccommodating.

There is also an entente between town council and boards of advice of neighborhood that prevents the outcrop of social conflicts. This way it has been operated on in about a thousand housings with their municipal services, file and local headquarters in a disused church, as in the neighborhood of the Carmen, change of street furniture, being placed, for example.

A third stage consists in obtaining the same goals towards the first periphery of working enlargement of the XIX through interventions more flexible with infrastructure and equipment, as well as small interventions in common elements of buildings.

Parallelly, an objective second it consisted in solving the problem of open and public spaces of the historic center, promoting the social use of them as well as the accessibility to the whole of area restricting the road traffic and promoting the peatonality. Everything that assumed economically with the resources of the town council and the help of the Italian State to the average cities.

At present there is a public debate of a project of V. Gregotti and G. Lombardi in an obsolete industrial zone of the city.

Josep Blesa i Morante, architect.

Article published in the suplement DIAREMA (Levante-EMV).