THREE DESIGN PROPOSALS

GROUP 1: THE RECOVERY OF IDENTITY: SENSORIAL RITUALS, EVENTS AND SYMBOLS

Group 1 (students: Beth Conti, Semih Cureç, Sertaç Kiliç, and Seymanur Çelik) decided, based on the analysis, to establish a strategic planning concentrated in La Rovira hill. La Rovira gathers a layer of history (the anti-aircraft battery and the quarry), together with an important polluted space by tens of relay masts above the roof of self-built houses. They decided to preserve and accentuate the clear two different natures of the hill. One occupied by housing, the anti-aircraft battery and the quarry, and the other one, the natural forest covering the Eastern part of the hill, with its winding paths. The first strategic decision was to concentrate communal urban agriculture in the slopes of the quarry. The second one was to improve the loss of identity of the site, and the recovery of its important historical memory by the introduction of new events, happening once monthly. These events would attract the population of the city into the area in order to participate in specific memorial acts and leisure activities, and therefore to strengthen the social attachment to the site. Eco-pavilions, in the top of the hill, at the back of the anti-aircraft battery, would collect water and wind energy as a resource for the illumination of the historical site. They would also become new attractors, and night light icons for the whole city. The third strategic decision was to eliminate all the relay masts for only one antenna that would be located in a clearing in the woodland of the hill. The antenna becomes a new symbol on the site, on memorial of the war, because Tres Turons was a strategic site for the defense of the city. A fourth strategic decision was to determine two types of access to the site: one by public bus, through the winding paths of the forest, the second one, pedestrian. The pedestrian access and entrance to La Rovira is located at the base of the quarry. It becomes a ritual ascendant path experience, where the senses are activated, like the ear (the walking rhythm on different materials -wood, earth, steel- or the sound of the wind mills at the distance), smell of the flowers, the taste of the fruits in the trees, the sense of touch everywhere and the splendid 360 degrees sight of the city. Through the ascending path, different levels of vegetable gardens can be accessed. At the beginning of the ramp-promenade there is a square with a local open market, where local vegetables can be sold, reducing transportation cost energy between food production and consume.
Group 1 Presentation

GROUP 2: INTERCONNECTIVITY AND ACCESSIBILITY: CORRIDORS, NODES AND LOOPS

Group 2 (Inés Casanova, Kerim Ozdemir, Elisabet Badia, and Carlos Briseño) decided, based on the analysis, to set up a strategic planning concentrated in the three hills of Tres Turons. The first strategic decision was to establish a communication network of corridors, nodes and loops. This connection, through a hierarchical path system, allowed the interconnectivity among the three differentiated areas of Creueta, Carmel and Rovira. A second important strategy was to preserve the nature of the space, only upgrading specific locations, by design actions to improve the quality of the public space, and offer a platform for public activities for the city. A third strategic decision was the accessibility to the site, reinforcing three main nodes as central strategic locations for commerce, parking and pedestrian accesses. The students also studied which were the most important locations were education, tourism, recreation; young platforms for self-expression, and commerce were going mainly to be developed, despite they received the comment about the possible overlapping of these uses in the site. They developed three main design actions. One was an access node in la Rovira, at the base of the quarry. This node was a built structure of terraces, with ramps, for vehicles, in order to solve the parking congestion in the neighborhood, and to allow the pedestrian access to the upper part of the hill by elevators. This structure was covered by a technological skin of solar cells and humidity collectors. The skin covered the structure as a new topography, helping to integrate and adapt the building inside the quarry. A second action was the upgrading of the quarry of Creueta del Coll. Its natural topography allows the creation, opposite to the existing Park of La Creueta, of an amphitheater with terraces, as a platform for social gathering, concerts and festivals, and new fruit tree plantations. A third action was the development, in detail, of one of the communication network loops. A loop is a secondary path in the hierarchy of the main corridor with a circular circuit. The loop of El Carmel, crosses a self-built community, that is transformed into an urban agriculture community that takes care of the vegetable gardens. The new landscape design of the loop reinforces the existing qualities of the site, adding few improvements to fences and housing walls, path boundaries, and rain water collectors.
Group 2 Presentation

GROUP 3: SUSTAINABLE TOURISM: LEISURE, EMPLOYMENT AND COMMERCE

Group 3 (Merlin Kasmer, Cansu Gündogdu, and Asli Gündüz) decided, based on the analysis, to define a strategic planning for the three hills of Tres Turons. They concentrated their actions in the north and north-east side of the hills, where local self-organized gardening is possible to observe. They reinforced the processes that are already occurring in the site, creating a system of urban agriculture that is self-sustained and ecological. Small vegetable gardens, organized in a system of terraces and pedestrian paths, are rented to the citizens and to schools for educational purposes. The students create interdependency between the green as urban agriculture, connected to housing areas inside and in the perimeter of Tres Turons, to create employment and local self-sustenance. Urban agriculture could also give profit to the community by selling the goods in a food market, located in the quarry of La Rovira. This ecological food market could be an attractor for tourism and the inhabitants of the city. The students developed two main design actions. One was the study in detail of how these terraces for vegetable gardens should be designed, taking in account storages beneath the pedestrian paths and rainwater containers. Solar panel trees along the paths would collect energy for the illumination of the site at night. A second design action was the study through sketches of the new food market in La Rovira quarry. A temporary and dismountable construction made of tensile structures could give shape to an open air market.
Group 3 Presentation

EVALUATION AND CONCLUSION

Learning to design a landscape, using the interdisciplinary practice of landscape urbanism, through a flexible and dynamic system, taking in account scenario thinking, together with complexity processes of change and re-adaptation, helped to gather a different type of design results about how the future of Tres Turons Park should be. The projection of a future productive landscape for city was not determined by a finished compositional design of the Park. Instead, all three proposals for a future productive landscape, a green engine for the area of Carmel, were respectful with what already was existing. The students understood that it was important to make visible processes that were already occurring in the site. They only needed to guide these processes by design actions, limited in specific and strategic locations that were studied carefully based on the analysis of the site. The design strategy was the core of the design, and the strategic decisions made that, each group, could have a different result for the same park. Any of the three groups gave to their landscape design a specific landscape atmosphere, a clear design vision of a park. They simply let the site be as it is and evolve by itself, without any aesthetic make-up. All three groups realized that in order to plan a space to be sustainable, a study of the relation between different actors is needed, such as education, tourism, recreation, commerce. They also realized how important is in landscape planning to transmit and to map complex processes of interactions and relations between actors, and how difficult is to represent those mappings, which should be clear and readable. Everybody agreed that the movement through different scales in process thinking helped the students to have a clear strategy, and at the same time, to be able to understand the physical and tactile nature of the site, where people move and interact.