Author: Luisa Afanador
A restless mind about the city.
NAME OF WORK: Heritage Fabric: 5th Street as a corridor of conciliation and civic activation.
ARCHITECTS: Nine architecture + Entropy + Land
PHOTOGRAPHY: Nine architecture + Entropy + Land
LOCATION: Cali, Colombia
YEAR: 2023
M2: 112,019,000 m2
This is the first article in the “urban sutures” series. A series of articles that addresses the city from its edges and limits in projects that carry out a reconnecting function; “operation suture” as an urban strategy for recomposition and repair of past actions that have generated "scars" in the city, leaving as a consequence a fragmented urban fabric.
The Urban Planning and Landscaping Preliminary Project competition in Santiago de Cali: The Paseo de Jovita al Río, framed as its name indicates from 23rd street with the students park where the Jovita monument is located, to race 1 with the Cali River, and an “arm” corresponding to cra 4 between street 5 and street 3 west; entails interesting reflections from its approach to the winning proposal, as a repair project that starts from the existing symbols and dynamics and proposes new ones in its path while colonizing with new spaces and dynamics for the pedestrian other areas of the city that are less walked and less connected, but very congested by vehicular traffic.
5th Street in Cali as we know it today has undergone important urban transformations, which have generated a debt with the city. This road that connects the city from north to south, has been widened due to the growth of the city in the 70s due to the division of the properties of the original road profile, leaving as a result some disused properties, parking lots street level, properties with unattractive dimensions and proportions for development that, despite the passage of time, are still evident.
A characteristic road profile that varies between 25 and 40 meters wide in an approximate extension of 1.4 kilometers in length, with only 4 pedestrian crossing points, makes evident the ambiguous fragmentation and scar of an edge in the middle of the city that connects in its longitudinal direction, but divides in its transverse direction. Not only neighborhoods and urban planning units, but their hardness resulting from widening, subsidence, discontinuity of public space and pedestrian accessibility, is accentuated by the topographic, morphological and predominant activity differences between each of the sides, where The east side is characterized by institutional activities while on the west side cultural tourism and gastronomy activities predominate.
The Heritage Fabric proposal: 5th Street as a corridor of conciliation and civic activation, is structured in 3 stages: Rambla del Origen, Alameda de las Ceibas and Paseo de la Cultura; in 6 thematic axes called multifunctional center, collaborative center, biodiverse center, accessible center, inhabited center and productive center. Among which we can broadly point out some of these methodological and strategic decisions from the perspective of the suture operation:
The first and most radical of the actions, established by the competition, is carried out in the Rambla del Origen section, whose intervention consists of the vehicular collapse of this section, allowing the pedestrian integration of both urban fronts between the historic center of the city and San Antonio, one of the traditional neighborhoods of the city.
In this same sense, the general implementation strategy proposes the integration of cultural, historical and environmental settings located in its area of influence by a transversal and longitudinal public space system that energizes both edges, allowing a convergence towards the proposed nodes along 5th Street. All of this is environmentally integrated through biotic corridors that highlight the landscape, urban water management and a historical heritage route made up of a system of signage and urban furniture that allow the heritage to be framed through a walk through urban spaces and architectural.
For the growth model of this edge, we are committed to the reconfiguration of the urban fronts of 5th Street through models and occupation typologies that propose the use of opportunity properties and the redensification property by property through architectural recycling, englobes and heritage exaltation. . All this taking into account the permeability and activation of the first floors that guarantee direct interaction with the public space and the block centers.
Lastly, but not least, the daytime and nighttime urban activation of these integrated fronts is planned, through the programmed pedestrianization of roads for the extension of multipurpose urban scenarios, articulated with an urban agenda of cultural activities and integration of productive spaces as a measure. of economic use and support for public life.
There are several elements of the city that we could consider scars or infrastructures of intra-urban edges and that feeding on the vision of authors like Lynch and others who have extensively dealt with issues of city image and morphology can lead us to question: What other reflections, Suture operation projects and strategies could emerge for the city on these edge elements? and deepen the view on the relevance of rebuilding on what was built, enabling connections and understanding the city as a broken and fragmented ceramic that must be treated through the suture operation as a tool for repairing the current city and mitigating for the expansion of the future city.