El Confidencial: “Eddea diseña tres nuevos barrios en Sevilla con más de 30.000 viviendas” (Eddea designs three new neighbourhoods in Seville with more than 30,000 homes)
El Confidencial has published an in-depth feature by José Luis Losa on the three major urban developments that EDDEA is advancing in Seville on behalf of three different public authorities: more than 30,000 homes that will house over 60,000 people over the coming decade.
Three authorities, three scales
For Seville City Council, the Distrito Aeroespacial: ten million square metres to the north-east of the city, with up to 24,000 homes linked to the technology hub around San Pablo airport. The developer Vía Ágora, led by Juan Antonio Gómez-Pintado, has already secured a position in the district to build the first 2,000 homes using an industrialised model, with the first cranes expected at the end of 2026 or early 2027.
For the Diputación de Sevilla (Seville Provincial Council), Barrio de Quarto: some 6,000 homes, half of them subsidised, arranged around a metropolitan park that aspires to be “bigger than the Alamillo” and is meant to stitch the south of the city to Dos Hermanas. The Provincial Council has earmarked €3 million in its 2026 budget to begin earthworks, with the neighbourhood expected to be habitable within five years.
And for the Port of Seville, the Distrito Urbano Portuario, the most advanced of the three, which will transform two kilometres of the Guadalquivir riverbank along Avenida de las Razas.
A practice of 42 professionals
The feature also traces the history of the practice, founded in 1992 by José María de Cárdenas and Luis Ybarra when they had only just left architecture school. Today the studio has around 42 professionals at its headquarters in the Port of Seville, expects to close the financial year with turnover of close to €4.5 million, and divides its work between urban and regional planning (60%) and architecture and building (40%).
Following the closure of its Moscow office in 2023, the studio has kept up its international activity: it works with the Spanish engineering firm Typsa on major industrial developments in Saudi Arabia, where it applies CITYPLAIN®, the urban design software developed in the CITYTHINKING lab, which makes it possible to plan complex cities through automated processes and industrialised construction systems.
De Cárdenas uses the feature to call for a review of the regulatory framework: density parameters that still assume 2.4 people per home when the reality is closer to 1.8, or infrastructure obligations that drive up construction costs without meeting real needs. His aspiration, he says, is to contribute to a model of affordable industrialised housing that would allow a young person to buy their first home for around €100,000.
