José María de Cárdenas: “I would build housing in La Cartuja before Tablada”

To mark the studio’s thirtieth anniversary, ABC de Sevilla interviewed José María de Cárdenas, who had returned to the helm of EDDEA as managing director after a decade leading its international division – with projects such as the urban expansion of Moscow and the Kaohsiung Pop Music Centre – and was then taking on the design of the new Port Urban District (Distrito Urbano Portuario).

A city that needs to grow

“Cities are like companies: if they don’t grow at 2 or 3%, they die,” he warns. He identifies the absence of a stock of middle-class housing as the central problem – “it’s dramatic; almost all of it is going to the metropolitan ring” – and argues for growing inwards as well, densifying the locations best served by public transport.

The Port District, on a southern European scale

“The Port District will bring about a drastic change for Seville, a flagship project on a southern European scale,” he says, distinguishing it from conventional waterfront schemes: “it has every sign of becoming an economic space that goes far beyond tourism”.

Listen before approving

De Cárdenas champions the port’s participatory process, in which more than 200 initiatives were incorporated into the plan: “presenting a plan without listening and then approving it belongs to the last century. Public participation has to be something more than a mere obligation”.

On Tablada he holds to a thesis he has defended for years: open space, but “not green but blue”, understood from the river. And he adds that before that debate Seville has other pieces to resolve, starting with La Cartuja.

Interview by Javier Macías, published on 9 July 2023.