De Cárdenas: “Identity, liveability and inclusiveness will be the central pillars of the new Navalips urban quarter”

José María de Cárdenas, architect and founding partner of EDDEA, has presented in Cádiz the feasibility study drawn up by the firm for the Navalips site, an urban development on a plot next to the city’s Zona Franca (free trade zone) which, he stresses, “will have identity, liveability and inclusiveness as its main pillars”.

On land owned by the Zona Franca itself and by the state-owned company Sepides, the scheme envisages a new, more inclusive, social and sustainable urban quarter, with room for 10,000 square metres of open space and shops and more than 800 new homes, 50% of them subsidised and the rest market-rate.

The architect notes that the project will help to conserve the city’s heritage and offer housing solutions that improve residents’ quality of life. To that end, it will seek to adapt historic buildings into liveable, functional spaces that preserve the essence of the setting, while prioritising the accessibility and adaptability of the homes to meet a range of needs.

Speaking to Diario de Cádiz, José María de Cárdenas explains that Navalips “is part of what we call Zona Franca 01, land designated in the General Plan, which in turn is one more piece of the Zona Franca’s ambitious project to give back to the city and gradually open up land that is now obsolete and needs to be recycled. The city evolves with its people and this area cannot be any different.”

“We now have a site with a total intervention area of 80,000 square metres where there is a pre-existing fabric; in other words, we have a past that we have wanted to value,” he adds.

Identity

As De Cárdenas underlines, one of the fundamental elements of the strategy is “to speak of the identity of the place”. “In Cádiz that is easy: you only have to work with the existing street network and respect the plot structure, and understand that the industrial activity that once took place there should not be lost or its traces erased, but used to redesign the new urban context,” he adds.

“On that same grid, which will make management much easier, we felt that the next step was to talk about liveability,” he says. The Navalips strategy therefore envisages transforming a commercial facility planned for the area that has become obsolete (what was always known as the multi-purpose bullring) into a new green urban space.

“In line with the 2030 Agenda and the need to increase biodiversity in cities, this commercial land will become a green lung of 8,000 square metres that stretches the city out to the new edge of the Zona Franca,” the EDDEA founding partner stresses.

In the architect’s view, “this is possible without losing any of the development rights or any of the functions the General Plan intended for this land, which is essentially to include housing. But first we have worked to make it more fluid and transparent and to gather together areas that, given the current plot structure, could not be achieved, by opening up transverse axes.”

Finally, another part of the strategy is to foster inclusiveness: “The city has to work 24 hours a day, be open and have everything, and that is achieved by mixing uses. Layers of commercial use in strategic places: we have found ground floors that can take commercial uses, with the residential buildings above them that will make it possible to deliver the plan.”

All of this, he says, “while making management easier and without having to resort to a specific amendment of the plan, but within the one currently in force”.