Metropolitan Forest, Southern River Parks

The Metropolitan Forest project is an extraordinarily innovative initiative of the Madrid City Council. The project consists of the transformation of the huge vacant area - thousands of hectares - which is ecologically and socially very degraded around the city, into a continuous forest that will completely surround Madrid. This forest will link the main ecological vectors located around Madrid and will have penetrations into the interior of the city allowing citizens and, in a way, the fabric to link the most valuable and greenest public spaces in the interior of the city with this formidable green ring. The ring was divided into five fragments and we have worked on those located at both ends of the meeting point between the Manzanares River and the city's hinterland - to the north and northwest, on the one hand, and to the south and southeast, on the other - with the aim of proposing a vision with greater unity and ecological and territorial scope.

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The project is very ambitious and includes many interventions of very different orders. They have to do with the ecological restoration of soils, the reforestation of existing forests that have lost vegetation mass as a result of anthropic pressure, the rehabilitation of riparian environments, the relocation of large infrastructures of service facilities or the urban stitching of the frayed fringes left on the edges by the city of Madrid.

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In any case, these major issues have a central axis which is the fluvial network constituted by the Manzanares river itself and its tributaries, streams and watercourses that are superimposed on the artificial network of sewage treatment plants, storm ponds and canalisations. The route of the water is, therefore, the essential element that gives it unity. However, the infrastructures - motorways, railway lines, purification facilities and other more urban ones such as the Magic Box - chop it up into a set of discontinuous and heterogeneous fragments. The project basically aims to strike a balance between the mosaic formed by each isolated unit and the ambition of unity of the ring as a whole; to effectively manage water resources, both natural and man-made; and to restore the ecological ground cover and vegetation in an attempt to rebuild valuable landscapes that are now largely degraded.

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