Olivenza

The challenge was to create an interface between the built-up city and agricultural land: not by preventing residential expansion, but by linking it to the natural agricultural landscape. How to create a dense, dynamic boundary from an urban perspective which dialogues and intermingles with the surrounding countryside? How to rethink the way people live on the outskirts? How can they be made compatible with short-circuit farming that is suited to the needs of the city?

The project reinterprets historic typologies of Olivenza’s town-country boundary (e.g., the wall, the gate, the bastion) to develop a series of programmatic and landscape tools that can be used to restructure and reactivate the urban edge.#cut The historic perimeter wall forms a thick, porous interface between urban and agricultural uses: it becomes both a public space and a hydraulic structure for improving water management. Defensive bastions are reversed and become parks that penetrate the dense city. Gates are projected outside the enclosure, punctuating the agricultural space with programmes that encourage cooperation, logistics and distributed production.