"...The project's goal is to arrange and improve the pedestrian connection between the Vallbona and Can Sant Joan districts, slightly regularizing the trace and the slope of the existing path to solve the lack of connection between adjacent neighborhoods...."
_Location: Montcada i Reixac, Barcelona, Spain
_Company:
Consorci del Besòs
COPCISA
Engineering | SBS Simón i Blanco
Clàudia Amías Roget – Architect and Landscape Architect, Clara Terradellas Rosell – Architect, Marta Sanz Cuso – Architect, Laura Florentín Aragón – Architect, Elisabeth Torregrosa Avilés – Building Engineering, Dolors Feu – Agricultural Engineer and Landscape Designer, Yago Cavaller Galí – Agricultural Engineer and Environmentalist
_Size: 7,608 m2
_Year completed: 2020
_Text credits:
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Project Description
A new connection safer, healthier and more sustainable
The project is located in an interstitial space between towns, on the confluence between the Collserola and Marina mountain ranges, touching the Rec Comtal and Besòs natural spaces.
Connecting the cities
The project's goal is to arrange and improve the pedestrian connection between the Vallbona and Can Sant Joan districts, slightly regularizing the trace and the slope of the existing path to solve the lack of connection between adjacent neighborhoods. Committing to soft mobility and a biophillic city: healthier, cleaner, and more accessible for people. The new 175m long passageway, is traced with gentle slopes for pedestrians in a renatured environment, acting as an overlook over the Besos river. The path stitches together the pedestrian urban network with the metropolitan free-space system through one of the shortest possible connections between Barcelona and Montcada.
Defining the standard section and choosing a limited material palette, a complex project is solved in a simple manner, paying attention to the specificity of the place and adapting to each spot in order to maintain existing vegetation and slopes in the most respectful way possible. The esplanade adjacent to the Primer de Maig square is arranged with fruit trees, creating an urban threshold where an insect hotel will be installed.
Respecting nature
The pier-like catwalk on stilts maintains the place's dynamic allowing for the crossing of fauna and maintaining the continuity of water in its natural runoff.
The 2m wide path avoids large land movements maintaining the site's orography and respecting the existing pine trees.
Managing rainfall
The areas closer to the urban fabric where the orography is favorable allows for a dike-like path with a gabion wall, retaining and laminating the surface run off water favoring the stability of the slope created by disaggregated slate strata and illegal dumps.
In the new door-to-door urban mobility paradigm, this new path must become a new more secure, healthier, and comfortable connection between both municipalities. A space destined to be a leisure path, a metropolitan link, and a natural lookout for everyone.
