Cañada Real Galiana, Madrid

Semester Project B.Sc. Landscape Architecture and Planning, Winter Semester 2019/20

Topic

The Cañada Real Galiana in Madrid, the largest slum in Europe, is located on a historic cattle drift in the southeast of Madrid. For more than 8,000 people, the Cañada Real, which presents itself to the visitor sometimes as a cultural landscape worth protecting, sometimes as an infrastructure and garbage dump of the metropolis of Madrid, is a lived reality and home. Alone, with family and neighbors, partly supported by non-governmental organizations, they have created and continue to create a living environment for themselves with the few resources available to them. This is not always aesthetic and conflict-free, but it addresses fundamental needs and desires in the area of conflict between private and public space and satisfies them (at least in part). After 5 years of political support and development of a legalization and enhancement plan, everything is open again in 2019 after elections. Will the coordinated improvement of living conditions that has begun continue, or will residents once again have to rely on self-help and micro-initiatives?

Task

How do spatial structures function and what does public life look like in the Cañada Real Galiana? In the design project, the first task is to determine and evaluate the fundamentals for the design task with the help of a classical, spatial analysis. The groups of the design project look for potentials and develop concrete design proposals for the exterior of a new neighborhood center and its perimeter in sector 5 of the Cañada Real.

Supervision

Prof. Regine Keller, Dipl.-Ing. Andreas Dittrich, M.Sc. Johann-Christian Hannemann, M.A. Matthias Oberfrank

Student works